Cupid "Metamorphoses". When Apollo taunts Cupid as the lesser archer, Cupid shoots him with the golden arrow, but strikes the object of his desire, the nymph Daphne, with the lead. Trapped by Apollo's unwanted advances, Daphne prays to her father, the river god Peneus, who turns her into a laurel, the tree sacred to Apollo. It is the first of several unsuccessful or tragic love affairs for Apollo. A variation is found in "The Kingis Quair", a 15th-century poem attributed to James I of Scotland, in which Cupid has three arrows: gold, for a gentle "smiting" that is easily cured; the
The Wood Nymph have failed to prepare "The Wood Nymph" for publication is a question that has perplexed scholars. On the advice of Ferruccio Busoni, Sibelius in 1895 offered "The Wood Nymph" to the Russian music publisher Mitrofan Belyayev but it was not published. Murtomäki has suggested that Sibelius, despite having been fond of "The Wood Nymph", was "unsure about the true value" of his output from the 1890s, an ambivalence that is perhaps best illustrated by the piecemeal publication history of, and multiple revisions to, the four "Lemminkäinen" legends (appearing in the composer's 1911 diary under a list of works to be