Chapter LXII: Scrapefoot

_Source._--Collected by Mr. Batten from Mrs. H., who heard it from her mother over forty years ago.

_Parallels._--It is clearly a variant of Southey's _Three Bears_ (No. xviii.).

_Remarks._--This remarkable variant raises the question whether Southey did anything more than transform Scrapefoot into his naughty old woman, who in her turn has been transformed by popular tradition into the naughty girl Silver-hair. Mr. Nutt ingeniously suggests that Southey heard the story told of an old vixen, and mistook the rustic name of a female fox for the metaphorical application to women of fox-like temper. Mrs. H.'s version to my mind has all the marks of priority. It is throughout an animal tale, the touch at the end of the shaking the paws and the name Scrapefoot are too _volkstümlich_ to have been conscious variations on Southey's tale. In introducing the story in his _Doctor_, the poet laureate did not claim to do more than repeat a popular tale. I think that there can be little doubt that in Mrs. H.'s version we have now recovered this in its original form. If this is so, we may here have one more incident of the great Northern beast epic of bear and fox, on which Prof. Krohn has written an instructive monograph, _Bär (Wolf.) und Fuchs_ (Helsingfors, 1889).