A bit of a tangent, but Tam Lin is a good example of folk story where the woman in necessary to rescue the hero, and I'm now going to have to look at others I know because my brain is insisting that they all involve the man being in the grip of Faery, and the only one it is proposing as proof is Kate Crackernuts. I used to read this sort of thing at school to instil the idea that fairy stories were not all passive girls being rescued by princes, and the feminists were wrong.

Penny