Europa's Fairy Book Part 26

_Parallels._--Besides the four sources used by Sir James Frazer, he gives two variants of the Breton from _Melusine_, i., cols. 300, 374, and the "Seven Wise Masters" version, with six variants: Russian, Masurian, two Basques, and a Turkish one. In the Russian version the father-water, mother-towel prophecy occurs, which could not have arisen independently. In the Masurian version the prophecy is more primitive ("Your mother will wash your feet, and your father will drink the water"). In the remaining versions the prophecy is more vague, that the parents shall be the son's servants. In the _Pentamerone_ there is a story in which a father has five simple sons whom he sends into the world to learn experience. The younger returns with a knowledge of the language of birds. But the rest of the story is not of our type.

_Remarks._--In his second paper (_Arch. Rev._ i., 161 _seq._) Sir James Frazer has many interesting remarks upon the folk conception of the means of acquiring a knowledge of the language of animals. This is generally done by a gift of magic rings, or by eating magic plants (mainly fern) or eating serpents (generally white). Sir James Frazer connects the rings with serpents by suggesting that serpents are supposed to have stones in their head which confer magic powers (_As You Like It_, iv., 2.) He further connects the notion of eating serpents with acquiring the language of birds by referring to the views of Democritus that serpents are generated from the mixed blood of diverse birds and are therefore in a strict sense blood relations of them; this idea, he suggests, may have arisen from the fact that serpents eat birds' eggs. It would be an easy transition in folk-thought to consider that serpents would understand the language of the birds they ate and that persons eating serpents would understand the language of both. So Sigurd understands the language of birds, after eating the blood of Fafnir the Worm. But all this throws little light upon the story itself.

Bolte gives, i., 323-4, many folk-tales in which the hero becomes not a pope but a king and compares the story of Joseph in the Bible as possibly a source of the Prophetic Dream of the father and mother waiting upon the son. The transference to the pope may have been influenced by the tradition given by Vincent of Beauvais (_Spec.

Hist._, xxiv., 98) that Sylvester II. learned at Seville the language of birds. There was also the tradition that at the election of Innocent III., 1198, three doves flew about the cathedral, one of which, a white one, at last settled down upon his shoulder. Raumer, _Gesch. d. Hohenstaufen_, ii., 595.

IX. THE THREE SOLDIERS

This tale is widely spread through Europe, being found from Ireland to Greece, from Esthonia to Catalonia. It is generally told of three soldiers, or often brothers, but more frequently casual comrades. In Kohler's notes on Imbriani, p. 356-7, he points out that there are three different forms, in the first of which the fairy's gifts are recovered by means of a defect produced, which only one of the soldiers can cure. In the second form the latter part is wanting, and in the third the two gifts are restored by means of the third, which is generally in the form of a stick. See _English Fairy Tales_, No.

32. In my reconstruction I have followed the first form. Cosquin, XI., has a fairly good variant of this, with comparative notes. Crane, x.x.xI., gives, from Gonzenbach, the story of the shepherd boy who makes the princess laugh, which is allied to our formula, mainly by its second part. And it is curious to find the three soldiers reproduced in Campbell's Gaelic, No. 10. In this version the magic gifts are wheedled out of the soldiers by the princess, but they get them back and go back to their "girls."

In the Chinese version of the Buddhist Tripitaka, a monk presents a man who has befriended him with a copper jug, which gives him all he wishes. The king gets this from the monk, but has to return it when he gets another jar which is full of sticks and stones. Aarne in _Fennia_, xxvii., 1-96, 1909, after a careful study of the numerous variants of the East and West, declares that the original contained three gifts and arose in southern Europe. From the three gifts came three persons and afterwards the form in which only two gifts occur.

Against this is the earliest of the Tripitaka versions, 516 A.D., which has only two magic gifts. Albertus Magnus was credited with a bag out of which used to spring lads with cudgels to a.s.sail his enemies.

X. DOZEN AT ONE BLOW

This story is familiar to English-speaking children as Jack the Giant Killer, but it is equally widespread abroad as told of a little tailor or cobbler. In the former case there is almost invariably the introduction of the ingenious incident, "Seven at a Blow," the number varying from three to twenty-seven. I have adopted a fair average. The latter part of the story is found very early in M. Monta.n.u.s, _Wegfuehrer_, Stra.s.sburg, 1557, though most of the incidents occur in folk tales scattered throughout the European area. Bolte even suggests that the source of the whole formula is to be found in Monta.n.u.s and gives references to early chapbook visions in German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and English (i., 154-6). But the very numerous versions in East Europe must in that case have been derived from oral tradition from these. Something similar has even spread to Greenland, where the story of the Giant and the boy is told by Rae, _Great White Peninsula_. (See Grimm, tr. Hunt, i., 364.) The Dutch version is told of Kobis the Dauntless. Cosquin, who has two versions (8 and 25), has more difficulty than usual in finding the full plot in Oriental sources, though various incidents have obviously trickled through to the East, as for example the hero Nasnai Bahadur in the Caucasus, who overcomes his three narts, or giants, very much in the same manner as our tailor.

XI. EARL OF CATTENBOROUGH

This Puss-in-Boots formula has become universally European from Perrault's version, to whom we owe the boots that occur in no other version, so that I have been reluctantly obliged to take them off. But apart from this the story in its entirety existed earlier in Straparola, xi., 1, and in the _Pentamerone_, and is found widely spread through Italy (Pitre, 88; Imbriani, 10; Gonzenbach, 65, etc.), as well as in Hungary (Jones and Kropf, No. 1), Germany (Grimm, 33a), and even in Finland (see Jones and Kropf, p. 305). In some of these cases the cat is a vixen (or female fox), and the incident of the false bathing and the marriage occurs before reaching the ogre's castle, as is indeed more natural. I have, therefore, so far amended Perrault. In most of the folk versions the miller's son betrays ingrat.i.tude towards his animal protector, who sometimes reduces him to his original state. This final incident, unknown to Perrault, shows the independence of these versions from that contained in his Mother Goose Stories. In Sweden the hero, if one may speak Hibernically, is a girl, who turns up her nose at everything in the palace as not being so good as in her castle of Cattenburg (Thorpe quoted by Lang, _Perrault_, p. lxxi.). In India it is found in Day, _Folk Tales of Bengal_, under the t.i.tle of "The Matchmaking Jackal," which has numerous Indian touches; thus the jackal remembers the grandeur of the weaver's forefathers and rolls himself in betel leaves. Sultan Darai, in the Swahili version (Steere), has the stripping incident and the no-talking trick, as well as the ingrat.i.tude at end. Lang argues elaborately that it is impossible to determine the original home of Puss-in-Boots, though he seems to own that it had one. His criterion is the absence or presence of a moral in the story, in this case the incident showing the ingrat.i.tude of the Marquis. This occurs, as we have seen, as far south as Madagascar, and as far east as India, but, after all, does not seem to be the essence of the story, though in one of the versions the cat does his tricks for the miller because he had previously saved him from the hunters. The late Mr. Ralston has an interesting article on Puss-in-Boots in the _Nineteenth Century_, August, 1883, though in his days there was a tendency to explain all fairy tales as variants of the Sun and Moon myths.

It is right that I should add that the servant's evening salute has nothing to do with the story but is a tradition in my own family, where my grandfather's servant used to utter this rhyme in a sort of chant when bidding the family good-night.

XII. THE SWAN MAIDENS

The Swan Maidens occur very widely spread and have been studied with great diligence by Mr. E. S. Hartland in two chapters (x., xi.) of his _Science of Fairy Tales_ (pp. 255-347). In consonance with his general principle of interpretation, Mr. Hartland is mainly concerned with the traces of primitive thought and custom to be seen in the Swan Maidens.

Originally these were, according to him, probably regarded as actual swans, the feathery robe being a later symbolic euphemism, though I would incidentally remark that the whole of the story _as a story_ depends upon the seizure of a separate dress involving the capture of the swan bride. Mr. Hartland is inclined to believe partly with F.

Liebrecht in _Zur Volkskunde_, pp. 54-65, that these mysterious visitors from another world are really the souls of deceased persons (probably regarded as totemistic ancestresses). In some forms of the story, enumerated by Mr. Hartland, the captured wife returns to her original home, not when she recovers her robe of feathers but when the husband breaks some tabu (strikes her, chides her, refers to her sisters, sees her nude, etc.).

From the standpoint of "storyology" from which we are mainly considering the stories here purely as stories, the Swan Maidens formula is especially interesting as showing the ease with which a simple theme can be elaborated and contaminated by a.n.a.logous ones. The essence of the story is the capture of a bride by a young man who seizes her garment and thus gets her _in manu_, as the Roman lawyers say. She bears him children, but, on recovering her garment, flies away and is no more heard of. Sometimes she superfluously imposes a tabu upon her husband, which he breaks and she disappears (Melusine variant; compare Lohengrin). This is the effective and affecting incident of which Matthew Arnold makes such good use in his _Merman_.

It could obviously be used, as Mr. Hartland points out, in a quasi-mythological manner to account for supernatural ancestry, as in the cases of the physicians of Myddvai in Wales, or of the Counts of Lusignan. But on this simple basis folk tellers have developed elaborations derived from other formulae. In several cases, notably in the _Arabian Nights_ (Jamshah and Hasan of Ba.s.sora), the capture of the swan maiden is preceded by the Forbidden Chamber formula. Then when the bride flies away there is the Bride-Quest, which is often helped by Thankful Animals and aided by the Magical Weapons. When the hero reaches the home of the bride he has often to undergo a Recognition-Test, or even is made to undertake Acquisition Tasks derived from the Jason formula; and even when he obtains his wishes in many versions of the story there is the Pursuit with Obstacles also familiar from the same formula.

Cosquin, ii., 16, has, with his usual a.n.a.lytical grasp, seen the separable character of these various series of incidents. He, however, attempts to show that all of them, including the germ of the Swan Maidens, are to be found in the East, and is successful in affiliating the Greek of Hahn, No. 15, with the two stories of the _Arabian Nights_ mentioned above, as well as the Siberian version given by Radloff, iv., 321, the hero of which has even derived his name from the Jamshah of the _Thousand and One Nights_.

In my own version I have utilized a few of these incidents but reserve most of them for their proper story environment. I have introduced, from the Campbell version, the phrase "seven Bens, and seven Glens, and seven Mountain Moors," which so attracted Stevenson's Catriona, in order to point out as a remarkable coincidence that Hasan of Ba.s.sora, in the _Arabian Nights_, flies over "seven Waddys, seven Seas, and seven Mountains." It is difficult to understand that such a remarkable phrase should recur accidentally in Bagdad and in the West Highlands.

Without some actual intermediation, oral or literary, the hypothesis of universal human tendency can scarcely explain such a coincidence.

XIII. ANDROCLES AND THE LION

This well-known story occurs first in the fables of Phaedrus, though not in the extant form, only being preserved in the mediaeval prose version known as _Romulus_. It is also referred to in Appian, Aulus Gellius, and Seneca (see the references in my _History of aesop_, p.

243, Ro. III., i.). It is told in Caxton's _Esope_, p. 62, from whom I have borrowed a few touches. He calls his hero Androclus, whereas Painter, in his _Palace of Pleasure_, ed. Jacobs, i., 89-90, calls the slave Androdus. We moderns, including Mr. Bernard Shaw, get our "Androcles" from Day's _Sanford and Merton_. It also occurs in _Gesta Romanorum_, 104, edit., Oesterley, who gives a long list of parallels in almost all the countries of Europe.

Benfey, in the introduction to his edition of _Pantschatantra_, i., 112, contends that the story is of Oriental origin, showing Buddhistic traits in the kindly relations between the slave and the lion; but the parallels he gives are by no means convincing, though the general evidence for Oriental provenance of many of Phaedrus' fables gives a certain plausibility to this derivation. From our present standpoint this is of less importance since Androcles, though it has spread through Europe and is current among the folk, is clearly of literary origin and is one of the few examples where we can trace such literary spread.

XIV. DAY DREAMING

I have given the story of the barber's fifth brother from the _Arabian Nights_ as another example of the rare instances of tales that have become current among the folk, but which can be definitely traced to literary sources, though possibly, in the far-off past, it was a folk tale arising in the East. The various stages by which the story came into Europe have been traced by Benfey in the introduction to his edition of _Pantschatantra_, - 209, and after him by Max Mueller in his essay "On the Migration of Fables" (_Chips from a German Workshop_, iv., 145-209; it was thus a chip from another German's workshop). It came to Europe before the _Arabian Nights_ and became popular in La Fontaine's fable of Perrette who counted her chickens before they were hatched, as the popular phrase puts it. In such a case one can only give a reproduction of the literary _source_, and it is a problem which of the various forms which appear in the folk books should be chosen. I have selected that from the _Thousand and One Nights_ because I have given elsewhere the story of Perrette (Jacobs, _aesop's Fables_, No. 45), and did not care to repeat it in this place.

I have made my version a sort of composite from those of Mr. Payne and Sir Richard Burton, and have made the few changes necessary to fit the tale to youthful minds. It is from the quasi-literary spread of stories like this that the claim for an Oriental origin of all folk tales has received its chief strength, and it was necessary, therefore, to include one or two of them in _Europa's Fairy Book_ (Androcles is another). But the mode of transmission is quite different and definitely traceable and, for the most part, the tales remain entirely unchanged; whereas, in the true folk tale, the popular story-tellers exercised their choice, modifying incidents and giving local colour.

XV. KEEP COOL

There is no doubt about the European character of this tale, which is found in Brittany, Picardy, Lorraine, among the Basques, in Spain, Corsica, Italy, Tyrol, Germany (though not in Grimm), among Lithuanians, Moravians, Roumanians, Greeks, Irish, Scotch, Danes, Norwegians (Cosquin, ii., 50). The central idea of the Rage-Wager is retained throughout, and in many places the punishment is the same--the loss of a strip of skin. In all but three instances the story is told of three brothers, which practically proves its ident.i.ty. I have given the Irish version in _More Celtic Fairy Tales_.

The "sells" however change considerably, though in most of them the final denoument comes with the death or wounding of the wife. The pigs' tails incident is also very common and is indeed found in another set of tales, more of the Master Thief type. Campbell's No. 45 had an entirely different set, some of them very amusing.

Mac-A-Rusgaich has all three meals at once and lies down. He holds the plough and does nothing else; he sees after the mountain; literally casts ox-eyes at the master, and makes a sheep foot-path out of sheep's feet. I have taken from Campbell the direction to wash horses and stable within and without, though it does not occur elsewhere. Yet Mac-A-Rusgaich has a bout with a giant, in which he slits an artificial stomach, like Jack the Giant Killer; and this incident occurs in four other of the European tales, again showing ident.i.ty.

"Keep cool" is thus an interesting example of ident.i.ty of framework, with variation of incident.

XVI. THE MASTER THIEF

The sneaking regard of the folk-mind for the clever rogue who can outwit the guardians of order (the ever-present enemy of the folk) was shown in early days by the myth of Rhampsinitus in Herodotus, ii., 121, which is found to this day among the Italians (see Crane, No. 44, and S. Prato, _La Leggenda del Tesoro di Rampsinite_, Como, 1882). But the more usual European form is that I have chosen for the text, the formula of which might be summed up as follows:

Apprenticeship in thievery--Purse or life--Hanging "sell"--Master Thief--Three Tests--Horse from Stable--Sheet off bed--Priest in bag--Horse from under (Thumb-Bung).

Almost the whole of this is found as early as Straparola i., 2, where Ca.s.sandrino is ordered by the provost of Perugia to steal his bed and his horse and to bring to him in a sack the rector of the village.

The purse incident occurs in Brittany, Piedmont, Tuscany, and Tyrol; in Iceland (Arnason, p. 609) occurs the man twice hanged which also occurs in Norway, Ireland, Saxony, Tuscany, and in Germany (Kuhn and Schwartz, 362); in Servia (Vuk, 46) the Master Thief steals sheep by throwing two shoes successively in the road, which also occurs in Bengal (Day, xi.); the theft of the horse occurs in Brittany, Norway, Ireland, Tuscany, Scotland (Campbell, 40), Flanders, in Basque and Catalan, Russia and Servia. The third test of kidnapping the priest occurs in Brittany, Flanders, Norway, Basque, Catalan, Scotland, Ireland, Lithuania, Tuscany. In Iceland the persons carried away are a king and a queen.

The three tests of the Master Thief, the stealing of bed, horse, and priest, occur as early as Straparola, i., 2, who also has a somewhat similar story of the "Scholar in Magic," viii., 5, which contains the zigzag transformation of the _Arabian Nights_. Both forms occur in Grimm, 68, 192. While the three tests are fairly uniform throughout Europe, the introduction by which the lad becomes a thief and proves himself a Master Thief varies considerably; and I have had to make a selection rather than a collation.

In some forms the farmer has three sons, of whom the youngest adopts thievery as a profession, which indeed it was in the Middle Ages (as we know from the Cul-le-jatte of _The Cloister and the Hearth_). In Hahn, 3, the Master Thief has to bring a "Drakos" instead of a priest.

Curiously enough, in Gonzenbach, 83, the Master Thief has to bring back a "dragu."

In many of the variants the Master Thief executes his tricks in order to gain the King's daughter by a sort of Bride Wager. But in most cases he does them in order to escape the natural consequences of his thievery.

XVII. THE UNSEEN BRIDEGROOM

The adult reader will of course recognize that this is the story of Cupid and Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and translated with such felicity by Pater in his _Marius_, Pt. i., ch. 5. Though the names of the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses--Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Juno, Proserpine, etc.--are scattered through the tale, it is now acknowledged on all hands that it has nothing to do with mythology but is a fairy tale pure and simple, as indeed is acknowledged by Apuleius who calls it a "fabella anilis." From this point of view it is of extreme interest to the student of the folk-tale as practically the same tale, with the Unseen Bridegroom, the Sight Taboo, the Jealous Mother-in-law, the Tasks, and the Visit to the Nether-World, occur in contemporary folk-tales scattered throughout Europe, from Norway (Dasent, "East o'

the Sun and West o' the Moon") to Italy (Gonzenbach No. 15, Pitre No.

18 given in Crane No. 1, _King of Love_); for the variants elsewhere see Koehler on Gonzenbach. The earliest form of the modern versions is found in Basile (1637), _Pentamerone_ v., 4, _The Golden Root_.

Now there are several circ.u.mstances showing the ident.i.ty of the ancient and modern forms of this story. All of them contain the punishment for curiosity motive, which is doubled both in Apuleius (with the coffer at the end) and in Basile and Crane. In several of the folk-tales the Ant-Help occurs in the performance of the tasks, and in Apuleius the successive visits to Juno and Ceres evidently represent the visits to the Queen-mother's sisters, often known as ogresses, found in Dasent, Basile, and in Grimm 88. It is possible, of course, that in some cases dim memories of Apuleius have percolated down to the folk, as is shown by the name of the hero in Pitre's version _Il Re d'Amore_. Kawczynski (Abh. d. Krakauer Akad. 1909, xlv.

1) declares for the derivation of the whole series of folk-tales from Apuleius but against this is the doubt whether this author was at all known during the Middle Ages.

But, to prove that the folk-tales were not derived directly or solely from the cla.s.sical romance they, in almost every case, had a series of adventures not found there, including the incidents, Obstacles to Pursuit, False Bride, and Sale of Bed. Now these incidents really belong to another formula, that of the Master-Maid, in which an ogre's or giant's daughter, helps the hero to perform tasks, flees away with him, is pursued by the ogre, loses her beloved through an Oblivion Kiss and has to win him again from his False Bride by purchasing the right of spending three nights with him. These incidents come in logically in the Master-Maid formula but are dragged in without real relevance into Cupid and Psyche; yet they occur as early as Basile where there is a dim reminiscence of the Oblivion Kiss. In reconstructing the formula I have therefore omitted these incidents, reserving them for their proper place (see Master-Maid).

Cupid and Psyche is of special interest to the student of the folk-tale since it is a means of testing the mythological, the anthropological, and the Indian theories of its origin. The mythological interpretation is nowadays so discredited that it is needless to discuss it, especially as we have seen that the mythological names given by Apuleius are only dragged in perforce. The anthropological explanation, given most fully by Andrew Lang in his admirable introduction to Addington's translation of Apuleius in the _Bibliotheque de Carabas_, gives savage parallels from all quarters of the globe to the seven chief incidents making up the tale, but leaves altogether out of account the artistic concatenation of the incidents in the tale itself and does not consider the later complications of the European folk-tales connected with it. M. Cosquin and others bring in the Vedic myth of Urvasi and Pururavas, but we have seen reason to reject the notion that the tale is, in its essence, mythological, and therefore need not consider its relation to Indian mythology. Cosquin, however, gives reference to the tale of Tulisa taken down from a washerwoman of Benares in 1833 (_Asiatic Journal_, new series, vol.

2), which has the invisible husband and the breaking of taboo, the jealous mother-in-law, and the tasks. This is indeed a close parallelism sufficient to raise the general question of relation between the Indian and the European folk-tale. But the earlier existence of the tale in Apuleius and Basile would give the preference to European influence on India rather than _vice versa_.

I should add that I have followed Apuleius in giving a symbolic name to the heroine of the tale, in order to suggest its relation to the cla.s.sical folk-tale of Cupid and Psyche, but not of course to indicate that it is in any sense mythological. The Descent-to-h.e.l.l incident, which is found both in the cla.s.sical and in the modern European forms and therefore in my reconstruction is only, after all, the application of a common form to the notion of difficult Tasks, which is of the essence of the story.