BOOK I. lights to pour contempt; he is Cinderella sitting in the dust, while her sisters flaunt their finery abroad; he is the Oidipous who knows nothing, yet reads the mysterious riddle of the Sphinx; he is the Phoibos who serves in the house of Admêtos and the palace of Laomedon; he is the Psyche who seeks her lost love almost in despair, and yet with the hope still living in her that her search shall not be unsuccessful; above all, he is the Ithakan chief, clothed in beggar's rags, flouted by the suitors, putting forth his strength for one moment to crush the insolent Arnaios, then sitting down humbly on the threshold, recognised only by an old nurse and his dog, waiting patiently till the time comes that he shall bend the unerring bow, and having slain his enemies appear once more in glorious garb by the side of a wife as radiant in beauty as when he left her years ago for a long and a hard warfare far away. Nay, he even becomes an idiot, but even in this his greatest humiliation the memory of his true greatness is never forgotten. Thus the Gaelic "Lay of the Great Fool" relates the Tale of wonder, that was heard without lie, Of the idiot to whom hosts yield, A haughty son who yields not to arms, The might of the world he had seized In his hands, and it was no rude deed; It was not the strength of his blade or shield, He becomes, of course, the husband of Helen, The mighty fool is his name, And his wife is the young Fairfine; And the yielding to him was mine; a kiss, and like and the Helen of the story has, of course, her Paris. The fool goes of Light (Excalibur, or the spear of But his coming who is wheedled of his three wish-gifts, but recovering them in the end is seen in his native majesty. 1 ὁ μηδὲν εἰδώς Οιδίπους. Sophokles, Oid. Tyr. 397. So again of Odysseus, άφρονα τ' aŬTws.-I. iii. 220. 2 Odyssey, xviii. 110. 3 Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands, iii. 154. BEASTS IN MYTHOLOGY. CHAP. is for evil luck, and the deceiver shall be well repaid when the fool CHAP. comes to take vengeance. Still will I give my vows, Though thou thinkest much of thy speech; When comes the Gruagach of the tissue cloak, He will repay thee for his wife's kiss. V. and com 81 Boots then acts the part of Balna's son in the Hindu story, while Mythical the sorcerer reappears in the Norse tale as a giant, who turns the repetitions six princes and their wives into stone. The incident is by no means binations. peculiar to this tale, and the examples already adduced would alone warrant the assertion that the whole mass of folk-lore in every country may be resolved into an endless series of repetitions, combinations, and adaptations of a few leading ideas or of their developements, all sufficiently resembling each other to leave no doubts of their fundamental identity, yet so unlike in outward garb and colouring, so thoroughly natural and vigorous under all their changes, as to leave no room for any other supposition than that of a perfectly independent growth from one common stem. If, speaking of the marvels wrought by musical genius, Dr. Newman could say, "There are seven notes in the scale; make them thirteen, yet how slender an outfit for so vast an enterprise,"1 we may well feel the same astonishment as we see the mighty harvest of mythical lore which a few seeds have yielded, and begin to understand how it is that ideas so repeated, disguised, or travestied never lost their charm, but find us as ready to listen when they are brought before us for the hundredth time in a new dress, as when we first made acquaintance with them. beasts in In the modified machinery of the Norse tale, the remonstrances Agency of addressed to Balna's son in the Hindu story are here addressed to Boots, whose kindness to the brute creatures who become his stories. 1 University Sermons, p. 348. In these two stories the Magician Punchkin and the Heartless Giant are manifestly only other forms of the dark beings, the Panis, who steal away the bright treasures, whether cows, maidens, or youths, from the gleaming west. In each case there is a long search for them; and as Troy cannot fall without Achilleus, so here there is only one who can achieve the exploit of rescuing the beings who have been turned into stone, as Niobê is hardened into rock. The youthful son of Balna in his disguise is the womanlike Theseus, Dionysos, or Achilleus. Balna herself imprisoned in the tower with the sorcerer whom she hates is Helen shut up in Ilion with the seducer whom she loathes; and as 2 The stories of Boots and Cinder- G these BOOK I. friends is drawn out in the more full detail characteristic of Western legends. The Hindu hero helps eagles only; Boots succours a raven, a salmon, and a wolf, and the latter having devoured his horse bears him on its back with the speed of light to the house of the giant who has turned his brothers into stone.1 There he finds, not his mother, like Balna's son, but the beautiful princess who is to be his bride, and who promises to find out, if she can, where the giant keeps his heart, for, wherever it be, it is not in his body. and the sun, she is clothed with the skin of a cat, a dog, or an ass, or, as in the instance of Allerleirauh, of all the beasts of the land. In each case, after escaping from desperate dangers by the help of a horse or a bull, she becomes a scullion, whose abode is a cellar into which the light of day cannot penetrate. From this noisome dungeon she is rescued by a threefold ordeal. In the English story of Catskin, the cook, in the first case, dashes a basin of water in her face; in the second, he breaks her head with the ladle; in the third, he smites her with the skimmer. In other versions the person who so ill-treats her under her mean disguise is the king or prince, whom she afterwards marries; but the three smitings, followed each by a greater display of splendour, are to be found in all. Whence came these features? That they could suggest themselves spontaneously to the fancy of savages in all parts of the world is beyond all bounds of belief. In its oldest shape seemingly the myth comes before us in the Vedic. story of Apala (the water-maiden), who comes down from the mountain to draw water, and in so doing draws Soma, or ambrosia, which she presents to the sun-god Indra. But the maiden is ugly and deformed, and to free her of her loathsomeness, Indra consents to pass over her three times. This threefold smiting is brought out more clearly in a legend of the Brihaddevatâ, in which the water-maiden beseeches Indra to make for her a beautiful and faultless skin. Indra accordingly passes over her with wheel, chariot, and rudder. By three efforts he takes off her ugly skin, and Apala appears in a beautiful one. The Soma which Apala brings to Indra becomes in the popular stories of Europe the soup which the kitchen drudge prepares for the king, or prince, or ford in the story, who in each case marries her. But the three smitings of Indra The constitute his marriage with the maiden, and there can be little doubt that the rudder of his chariot in the torn bosom of Apala has a fuller signification. This legend is cited in the "Zoological Mythology" of De Gubernatis, of which Mr. Coote, Folk Lore Record, vol. iii. part i., speaks as "one of the most remarkable combinations of erudi tion and imagination which this age has produced. The constant agency of wolves and foxes in the German stories at once suggests a comparison with the Myrmidons whom the Homeric poet so elaborately likens to wolves, with Phoibos himself as the wolf-god of Eschylos, and with the jackal princes of eastern story. In Grimm's story of "The Two Brothers," the animals succoured are the hare, fox, wolf, and lion, and they each, as in the Hindu tale, offer their young as ministers to the hero who has spared their lives. In the beautiful legend of the Golden Bird, the youngest brother and the fox whom by his kindness he secures as his ally, alike represent the disguised chieftain of Ithaka, and the rajas of the Hindu stories. The disguise in which the youngest brother returns home is put on by himself. He has exchanged clothes with a beggar; the fox is of course enchanted, and can be freed only by destroying the body in which he is imprisoned. But this idea of enchantment would inevitably be suggested by the magic power of Athênê in seaming the face of Odysseus with the wrinkles of a squalid old age, while the Christianised Northman would convert Athênê herself into a witch. In this story the mere presence of the disguised youth, who was supposed to be murdered, just as the suitors supposed Odysseus to be dead, makes the golden bird begin to sing, the golden horse begin to eat, and the beautiful maiden to cease weeping. The meaning is obvious. GIANTS WITHOUT HEARTS. 83 V. colloquies which lead at length to the true answer exhibit the giant CHAP. in the more kindly and rollicking character frequently bestowed on trolls, dwarfs, elves, and demons, in the mythology of the Western Aryans. The final answer corresponds precisely to that of Punchkin. "Far, far away in a lake lies an island; on that island stands a church; in that church is a well; in that well swims a duck; in that duck there is an egg; and in that egg there lies my heart, you darling." His darling takes a tender farewell of Boots, who sets off on the wolf's back, to solve, as in the Eastern tale, the mystery of the water and the bird. The wolf takes him to the island; but the church keys hang high on the steeple, and the raven is now brought in to perform an office analogous to that of the young eaglets in the Deccan legend. At last, by the salmon's help, the egg is brought from the bottom of the well where the duck had dropped it. "Then the wolf told him to squeeze the egg, and as soon as ever he squeezed it, the giant screamed out. "Squeeze it again,' said the wolf; and when the prince did so, the giant screamed still more piteously, and begged and prayed so prettily to be spared, saying he would do all that the prince wished. if he would only not squeeze his heart in two. "Tell him if he will restore to life again your six brothers and their brides, you will spare his life,' said the wolf. Yes, the giant was ready to do that, and he turned the six brothers into king's sons again, and their brides into king's daughters. 666 Now squeeze the egg in two,' said the wolf. So Boots squeezed the egg to pieces, and the giant burst at once." of written lore. The supposition that these stories have been transmitted laterally Influence is tenable only on the further hypothesis, that in every Aryan land, literature from Eastern India to the Highlands of Scotland, the folk-lore of the on Folkcountry has had its character determined by the literature of written books, that in every land men have handled the stories introduced from other countries with the deliberate purpose of modifying and adapting them, and that they have done their work in such a way as sometimes to leave scarcely a resemblance, at other times scarcely to effect the smallest change. In no other range of literature has any such result ever been achieved. In these stories we have narratives which have confessedly been received in the crudest form, if the fable of the Brahman and the goat is to be taken as the original of the Master Thief, and which have been worked up with marvellous vigour and under indefinitely varied forms, not by the scholars who imported the volumes of the Kalila and Dimna, or the Exploits of the Romans, but by unknown men among the people. The tales BOOK I. Faithful John. have been circulated for the most part only among those who have no books, and many, if not most, of them have been made known only of late years for the first time to the antiquarians and philologists who have devoted their lives to hunting them out. How then do we find in Teutonic or Hindu stories not merely incidents which specially characterise the story of Odysseus, but almost the very words in which they are related in the Odyssey? The task of analysing and comparing these legends is not a light one even for those who have all the appliances of books and the aid of a body of men working with them for the same end. Yet old men and old women reproduce in India and Germany, in Norway, in Scotland, and in Ireland, the most subtle turns of thought and expression, and an endless series of complicated narratives, in which the order of incidents and the words of the speakers are preserved with a fidelity nowhere paralleled in the oral tradition of historical events. It may safely be said that no series of stories introduced in the form of translations from other languages could ever thus have filtered down into the lowest strata of society, and thence have sprung up again, like Antaios, with greater energy and heightened beauty, and "nursery tales are generally the last things to be adopted by one. nation from another." But it is not safe to assume on the part of Highland peasants or Hindu nurses a familiarity with the epical literature of the Homeric or Vedic poets; and hence the production of actual evidence in any given race for the independent growth of popular stories may be received as throwing fresh light on questions already practically solved, but can scarcely be regarded as indispensable. It can scarcely be necessary to prove that the tale of the Three Snake Leaves was not derived by the old German story-tellers from the pages of Pausanias, or that Beauty and the Beast was not suggested by Appuleius. There is nothing therefore which needs to surprise us in the fact that stories already familiar to the western Aryans have been brought to us in their eastern versions only as yesterday. Probably no two stories furnish more convincing evidence of the extent to which the folk-lore of the Aryan tribes was developed, while they still lived as a single people, than that which we find in the German legend of Faithful John and the Deccan story of Rama and Luxman, who reflect the Rama and Laxmana of Purana legends. A comparison of these legends clearly shows that at least the following framework must have been devised before Hindus and Germans started on the long migration which was to lead the one to the 1 Max Müller, Chips, ii. 216. |