Fairytale in the Ancient World by Anderson Graham;

Author:Anderson, Graham; [GRAHAM ANDERSON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

The curious case of Philinnion (AT Types 307/407/425?)

The commonest motivation for coming back from the dead, or not going away in the first place, is the bond with a lover. We have a substantial fragment of a highly realistic ghost story quoted as the first of the miracle stories of Phlegon of Tralles:23

A lodger in a household discovers that the girl who comes to make love to him every night is in fact the ghost of the daughter of the household, dead for six months past; when disturbed by the intervention of the parents, the girl disappears for good; the fact that the corpse is found at the house while missing from the tomb serves to confirm the identification.

Hansen cites several folktale analogues, some of them quite close, but where the ghost is that of a man who comes to a woman,24 not of a woman to a man. He accordingly classifies the tale with ‘quest of the lost husband’ tales cognate to Cupid and Psyche. This is one way round a tale which seems genuinely quite difficult to assign to any specific Aarne-Thompson category. On the whole I think it is closer to AT Type 307, where the gender is the right way round: Ranke’s German tale 23 offers a similar outline:

A girl is lying in a tomb, but comes alive each night to savage the guard. One night a handsome young soldier is due for the fatal task and he consults an old man about precautions. He hides from her in the church for three nights in a row, but at the end of the third follows the old man’s instructions to bite her finger (an obvious sexual euphemism). She now becomes docile and the pair are able to marry.

Here again the tale is not a perfect fit, thanks to the happy ending. But there is a further variant, classified by Ranke as AT Type 407:

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