This formula constantly occurs in the Welsh fairy tales published by Professor Rhys. {82b} Thus the heir of Corwrion fell in love with a fairy:  ’They were married on the distinct understanding that the husband was not to know her name, . . . and was not to strike her with iron, on pain of her leaving him at once.’  Unluckily the man once tossed her a bridle, the iron bit touched the wife, and ’she at once flew through the air, and plunged headlong into Corwrion Lake.’

A number of tales turning on the same incident are published in ‘Cymmrodor,’ v.  I. In these we have either the taboo on the name, or the taboo on the touch of iron.  In a widely diffused superstition iron ‘drives away devils and ghosts,’ according to the Scholiast on the eleventh book of the ‘Odyssey,’ and the Oriental Djinn also flee from iron. {82c} Just as water is fatal to the Aryan frog-bride and to the Red Indian beaver-wife, restoring them to their old animal forms, so the magic touch of iron breaks love between the Welshman and his fairy mistress, the representative of the stone age.

In many tales of fairy-brides, they are won by a kind of force.  The lover in the familiar Welsh and German Marchen sees the swan-maidens throw off their swan plumage and dance naked..  He steals the feather-garb of one of them, and so compels her to his love.  Finally, she leaves him, in anger, or because he has broken some taboo.  Far from being peculiar to Aryan mythology, this legend occurs, as Mr. Farrer has shown, {83a} in Algonquin and Bornoese tradition.  The Red Indian story told by Schoolcraft in his ‘Algic Researches’ is most like the Aryan version, but has some native peculiarities.  Wampee was a great hunter, who, on the lonely prairie, once heard strains of music.  Looking up he saw a speck in the sky:  the speck drew nearer and nearer, and proved to be a basket containing twelve heavenly maidens.  They reached the earth and began to dance, inflaming the heart of Wampee with love.  But Wampee could not draw near the fairy girls in his proper form without alarming them.  Like Zeus in his love adventures, Wampee exercised the medicine-man’s power of metamorphosing himself.  He assumed the form of a mouse, approached unobserved, and caught one of the dancing maidens.  After living with Wampee for some time she wearied of earth, and, by virtue of a ’mystic chain of verse,’ she ascended again to her heavenly home.

Now is there any reason to believe that this incident was once part of the myth of Pururavas and Urvasi?  Was the fairy-love, Urvasi, originally caught and held by Pururavas among her naked and struggling companions?  Though this does not appear to have been much noticed, it seems to follow from a speech of Pururavas in the Vedic dialogue {83b} (x. 95, 8, 9).  Mr. Max Muller translates thus:  ’When I, the mortal, threw my arms round those flighty immortals, they trembled away from me like a trembling doe, like horses