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In the Slavonic story, “Leben, Abenteuer und Schwaenke des kleinen Kerza,” is a dwarf magician with a long white beard. With a hair from this beard Kerza binds the magician’s wicked wife, who has taken the form of a wooden pillar the better to carry out her evil ends. From that moment it was impossible for her to take again her own shape or to use her former magic powers (Vogl’s Volksmaerchen, p. 227). One of the tasks set by Yspaddaden Penkawr to Kilhwch before he will give him his daughter Olwen to wife, is to get him “a leash made from the beard of Dissull Varvawc, for that is the only one that can hold the two cubs. And the leash will be of no avail unless it be plucked from his beard while he is alive, and twitched out with wooden tweezers … and the leash will be of no use should he be dead because it will be brittle,”–that is, when the sun is set (dead) his rays have no power ( Mabinogion, vol. II. p. 288). The same idea lies at the bottom of the English superstition that “if a person’s hair burn brightly when thrown into the fire, it is a sign of longevity; the brighter the flame, the longer the life. On the other hand, if it smoulder away, and refuse to burn, it is a sign of approaching death” (Henderson’s Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England, p. 84).

The Malays have a story of a woman, called Utahigi, in whose head grew a single white hair endowed with magic power. When her husband pulled it out a great storm arose and Utahigi went up to heaven. She was a bird (or cloud) maiden, and this hair must have been the lightning drawn from the cloud. The Servian Atalanta, when nearly overtaken by her lover, takes a hair from the top of her head and throws it behind her. It becomes a mighty wood (clouds are the forests and mountains of the sky, Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, vol. I. p. 11), Karadschitsch, Volksmaerchen der Serben, p. 25, in the story “von dem Maedchen das behender als das Pferd ist.” In Schmidt’s Griechische Maerchen, Sagen und Volkslieder, p. 79, the king’s daughter as she flies with her lover from the Lamnissa throws some of her own hairs behind her, and they become a great lake (thunderbolts and lightning bring rain). At p. 98 of the same work is the story “Der Riese vom Berge.” When this giant wishes to enter his great high mountain, he takes a hair from his head and touches the mountain with it. The mountain at once splits in two (p. 101). The king’s daughter in her encounter with the Efreet, “plucked a hair from her head and muttered with her lips, whereupon the hair became converted into a piercing sword with which she struck the lion [the Efreet], and he was cleft in twain by her blow; but his head became changed into a scorpion” (Lane’s Arabian Nights, vol. I. p. 156). A Baba Yaga, in Ralston’s Russian Folk Tales, p. 147, plucks one of her hairs, ties three knots in it, and blows, and thus petrifies her victims. She is a personification of the spirit of the storm, ib. p. 164. In Old Deccan Days, at p. 62, the old Rakshas says to Ramchundra, “You must not touch my hair;” “the least fragment of my hair thrown in the direction of the jungle would instantly set it in a blaze.” Ramchundra steals two or three of the hairs, and when escaping from the Rakshas, flings them to the winds and fires the jungle. Chandra (p. 266 of the same book) avenges the death of her husband by tearing her hair, which burns and instantly sets fire to the land; all the people in it but herself and a few who had been kind to her and are therefore saved, were burnt in this great fire.