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694 TEEES AND ANIMALS.
continued to be done by the spinning girls in parts
1
as late as the 1 7th century.
of Schleswig
Folk- tales of Up. Germany inform us : Some girls, not grown
up, went one Sunday to a deserted tower on a hill, found the
stairs strewn with sand,, and came to a beautiful room they had
never seen before, in which there stood a bed with curtains.
When they drew these aside, the bed was swarming with goldbeetles,
and jumping up and down of itself. Filled with amaze
a terror seized
ment, the girls looked on for a while, till suddenly
them, and they fled out of the room and down the stairs, with an
unearthly howl and racket at their heels (Moneys Anz. 7, 477).
On the castle-hill by Wolfartsweiler a little girl saw a copper pot
standing on three legs, quite new and swarming full of horsebeetles
(roskafer). She told her parents, who saw at once that the beetles
were a treasure, and hastened with her to the hill, but found
neither pot nor beetles any more (ibid. 8, 305). Here beetles
appear as holy animals guarding gold, and themselves golden.
In Sweden they call the small goldbeetle (skalkrak) Virgin
Mary s key-maid (jungfru Marie nyckelpiga), Dybeck ;
s Runa
1844, p. 10; in spring the girls let her creep
about on their
hands, and say, hon marker mig brudhandskar/ she marks (foreshews)
me bride s gloves ; if she flies away, they notice in which
direction, for thence will come the bridegroom. Thus the beetle
seems a messenger of the goddess of love ; but the number of
the black spots on his wings has to be considered too : if more
than seven, corn will be scarce that year, if less, you may look
for an abundant harvest, Afzel. 3, 112-3.
The little coccinella
nearly all our dialects :
septempunctata has
NHG. gotteskiililein
mythical names in
2
(God s little cow),
gotteskalb, herrgotteskalb, herrgotts-thiercheu (-beastie), herr-
gots-voglein (-birdie), Marienvoglein, Marienkafer, Marienkalblein ;
Engl. ladycoWj ladybird, ladyfly; Dan. Marihone (-hen); Boh.
Jcrawlca, krawicka (little cow). In Up. Germany they call the
small goldbeetle (chrysomela vulg.) fraua-chueli, lady cow (Tobler
1 An old description of the maygrave feast by Ulr. Petersen (in Falck s New
staatsb. mag., vol. 1, Schlesw. 1832, p. 655) speaks of it thus : A quaint procession
of the erewhile amazons of the spinning-wheel at Schleswig, for fetching in of a
cantharis or maykdfer with green boughs, whereat the town-hall of this place was
decked out with greenery. The feast was still held in 1630 40.
2 The Kuss. B6zhia korovka, has exactly the same meaning. TBANS.