Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

BOOK

I.

assumes a form more closely akin to the imagery of Teutonic mythology; and there we find a princess who declares that she will marry no one who has not leaped over her bath, which "has high marble walls all round, with a hedge of spikes at the top of the walls." In the story of Vicram Maharaja the parents of Anar Ranee "had caused her garden to be hedged round with seven hedges made of bayonets, so that none could go in nor out; and they had published a decree that none should marry her but he who could enter the garden and gather the three pomegranates on which she and her maids slept." So, too, Panch Phul Ranee, the lovely Queen of the Five Flowers, " dwelt in a little house, round which were seven wide ditches, and seven great hedges made of spears." The seven hedges are, however, nothing more than the sevenfold coils of the dragon of the Glistening Heath, who lies twined round the beautiful Brynhild. But the maiden of the Teutonic tale is sunk in sleep which rather resembles death than life, just as Dêmêtêr mourned as if for the death of Persephone while her child sojourned in the dark kingdom of Hades. This idea is reproduced with wonderful fidelity in the story of Little Surya Bai, and the cause of her death is modified in a hundred legends both of the East and the West. The little maiden is high up in the eagle's nest fast asleep, when an evil demon or Rakshas seeks to gain admission to her, and while vainly striving to force an entrance leaves one of his finger-nails sticking in the crack of the door. When on the following morning the maiden opened the doors of her dwelling to look down on the world below, the sharp claw ran into her hand, and immediately she fell dead. The powers of winter, which had thus far sought in vain to wound her, have at length won the victory; and at once we pass to other versions of the same myth, which tell us of Eurydikê stung to death by the hidden serpent, of Sifrit smitten by Hagene (the Thorn), of Isfendiyar slain by the thorn or arrow of Rusten,1 of Achilleus vulnerable only in his heel, of Brynhild enfolded within the dragon's coils, of Meleagros dying as the torch of doom is burnt out, of Baldur the brave and pure smitten by the fatal mistletoe, of the sweet Briar Rose plunged in her slumber of a hundred years.

Origin of The idea that all these myths have been deliberately transferred all myths from Hindus or Persians to Greeks, Germans, and Norsemen may be relating to charmed dismissed as a wild dream. Yet of their substantial identity in spite sleep of beautiful of all points of difference and under all the disguises thrown over maidens. them by individual fancies and local influences, there can be no question. The keynote of any one of the Deccan stories is the key1 Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 323.

DRAGONS AND SLEEPING MAIDENS.

V.

note of almost all; and this keynote runs practically through the great CHAP. body of tales gathered from Germany, Scandinavia, Ireland, and Scotland. It is found again everywhere in the mythology of the Greeks, whether in the legends which have furnished the materials for their magnificent epics, or have been immortalised in the dramas of their great tragedians, or have remained buried in the pages of mythographers like Pausanias or Diodoros. If then all these tales have some historical foundation, they must relate to events which took place before the dispersion of the Aryan tribes from their original home. If the war at Troy took place at all, as the Homeric poets have narrated it, it is, to say the least, strange that precisely the same struggle, for precisely the same reasons, and with the same results, should have been waged in Norway and Germany, in Wales and Persia. Unless we are to adopt the hypothesis of conscious borrowing in its most exaggerated form, the dream of a historical Ilion and a historical Carduel must fade away before the astonishing multitude of legends which comparative mythologists have traced to phrases descriptive of physical phenomena. At the least it must be admitted that the evidence seems to point in this direction. To take these stories after any system, and arrange their materials methodically, is almost an impossible task. The expressions or incidents worked into these legends are like the few notes of the scale from which great musicians have created each his own world, or like the few roots of language which denoted at first only the most prominent objects and processes of nature and the merest bodily wants, but out of which has grown the wealth of words which feed the countless streams of human thought. In one story we may find a series of incidents briefly touched, which elsewhere have been expanded into a hundred tales, while the incidents themselves are presented in the countless combinations suggested by an exuberant fancy. The outlines of the tales, when these have been carefully analysed, are simple enough; but they are certainly not outlines which could have been suggested by incidents in the common life of mankind. Maidens do not fall for months or years into death-like trances, from which the touch of one brave man alone can arouse them. Dragons are not coiled round golden treasures or beautiful women on glistening heaths. Princes do not everywhere abandon their wives as soon as they have married them, to return at length in squalid disguise and smite their foes with invincible weapons. Steeds which speak and which cannot die do not draw the chariots of mortal chiefs, nor do the lives of human kings exhibit everywhere the same incidents in the same sequence. Yet every fresh addition made to our stores of popular tradition does

91

BOOK

I.

Charms or spells in the Odyssey and in Hindu stories.

but bring before us new phases of those old forms of which mankind, we may boldly say, will never grow weary. The golden slipper of Cinderella is the slipper of Rhodôpis, which an eagle carries off and drops into the lap of the Egyptian king as he sits on his seat of judgement at Memphis. This slipper reappears in the beautiful Deccan story of Sodewa Bai, and leads of course to the same issue as in the legends of Cinderella and Rhodôpis. The dragon of the Glistening Heath represents the seven-headed cobra of the Hindu story, and in the legend of Brave Seventee Bai the beautiful Brynhild becomes his daughter, just as the bright Phoibos is the child of the sombre Leto. In the Greek myth dragons of another kind draw the chariot of Medeia, the child of the sun, or impart mysterious wisdom to Iamos and Melampous, as the cobras do to Muchie Lal. That the heroes of Greek and Teutonic legends in almost every case are separated from, or abandon, the women whom they have wooed or loved is well known; and the rajas and princes of these Hindu stories are subjected to the same lot with Heraklês and Odysseus, Oidipous and Sigurd, Kephalos and Prokris, Paris and Oinônê. Generally the newly-married prince feels a yearning to see his father and his mother once more, and, like Odysseus, pines until he can set his face homewards. Sometimes he takes his wife, sometimes he goes alone; but in one way or another he is kept away from her for years, and reappears like Odysseus in the squalid garb of a beggar.

Curiously enough, in these Hindu stories the detention of the wandering prince or king is caused by one of those charms or spells which Odysseus in his wanderings discreetly avoids. The Lotoseaters and their magic fruit reappear in the nautch-people or conjurors, whom the rajah who has married Panch Phul Ranee, the Lady of the Five Flowers, asks for rice and fire. The woman whom he addresses immediately brings them. "But before she gave them to him, she and her companions threw on them a certain powder, containing a very potent charm; and no sooner did the raja receive them than he forgot about his wife and little child, his journey and all that had ever happened to him in his life before: such was the peculiar property of the powder. And when the conjuror said to him, Why should you go away? Stay with us and be one of us,' he willingly consented." Unless the translator has designedly modified

[ocr errors]

1 Ælian, V. H. xiii. 33; Strabo, xvii. p. 808. Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, i. 31, 126.

2 This forgetfulness of his first love on the part of the solar hero is brought

about in many of the German stories by his allowing his parents to kiss him on one side of his face, or on his lips. In the Gaelic story of the Battle of the Birds neither man nor other crea

THE ROD AND THE LOTOS.

the language of the Deccan tale-teller (and in the absence of any admission to this effect we cannot suppose this), we may fairly quote the words as almost a paraphrase from the Odyssey :

τών δ ̓ ὅς τις λωτοῖο φάγοι μελιηδέα καρπόν,

οὐκ ἔτ ̓ ἀπαγγεῖλαι πάλιν ἤθελεν οὐδὲ νέεσθαι,
ἀλλ ̓ αὐτοῦ βούλοντο μετ ̓ ἀνδράσι Λωτοφάγοισιν
λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι μενέμεν νόστου τε λαθέσθαι.

The nautch-woman here has also the character of Kirkê, and the
charm represents the κakà pápμaka which turn the companions of
Eurylochos into swine, while Kirkê's wand is wielded by the sor-
cerers who are compelled to restore to life the victims whom they
had turned into stone, and by the Rakshas from whom Ramchundra,
in the story of Truth's Triumph, seeks to learn its uses. "The
rod," she replies, "has many supernatural powers; for instance, by
simply uttering your wish, and waving it in the air, you can conjure
up a mountain, a river, or a forest, in a moment of time." At length
the wanderer is found; but Panch Phul Ranee and Seventee Bai
have the insight of Eurykleia, and discern his true majesty beneath.
the fakeer's garb.2 "The raja came towards them so changed that

[blocks in formation]

This garment of humiliation appears in almost innumerable legends. In the German story of the Golden Bird the prince puts it on when, on approaching his father's house, he is told that his brothers are plotting his death. In the tale of the Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn, the wanderer who comes in with a coat torn to rags has a knapsack from which he can produce any number of men, and a horn (the horn of the Maruts) at whose blast the strongest walls fall down. He thus takes on his enemies a vengeance precisely like that of Odysseus, and for the same reason. In the story of the Golden Goose, Dummling, the hero who never fails in any exploit, is despised for his wretched appearance. In that of the Gold Child the brilliant hero comes before the king in the guise of a humble bear-hunter. The tale of the King of the Golden Mountain repeats the story of King Putraka, and shows the Gold Child in a shepherd's ragged frock. Elsewhere he is seen as the poor miller's son (the Miller's Son and the Cat), and he becomes a discharged

soldier in the story of "The Boots
made of Buffalo Leather." The beg-
gar reappears in the Norse tale of
Hacon Grizzlebeard, the Thrushbeard
of Grimm's collection, while Boots,
who grovels in the ashes, is the royal
youth who rides up the mountain of ice
in the story of the Princess on the
Glass Hill. In another, Shortshanks,
who by himself destroys all the Trolls
opposed to him, is a reflexion of
Odysseus, not only in his vengeance,
but in his bodily form. Odysseus is
Shortshanks when compared with Mene-
laos (Iliad iii. 210-11). In the tale of
the Best Wish (Dasent), Boots carries
with him in the magic tap the horn of
Amaltheia, and is seen again as a
tattered beggar in the story of the
Widow's Son. In the legend of Big
Bird Dan he is the wandering sailor,
who, like Odysseus, is tossed, worn and
naked, on the Phaiakian shore; in that
of Soria Moria Castle (a tale in which
the Sun seeks for the Dawn, the re-
verse of the Psychê story) he is Halvor
who grubs among the ashes-the con-
nexion with fire and light being never
forgotten in these stories, for these
ashes are always living embers. The
adventure of Halvor is for the recovery
of a Helen, who has been stolen away
by a Troll; but no sooner is the Ilion

93

CHAP.

V.

BOOK

I.

The Snake
Leaves.

not even his own mother knew him; no one recognised him but his wife. For eighteen years he had been among the nautch-people; his hair was rough, his beard untrimmed, his face thin and worn, sunburnt, and wrinkled, and his dress was a rough common blanket." Can we possibly help thinking of the wanderer, who in his beggar's dress reveals himself to the swineherd; or of his disguise, when Athênê destroyed his golden locks and clothed him in tatters;1 and lastly of his recognition by his old nurse when she saw the wound made by the bite of the boar who slew Adonis? So in the Vengeance of Chandra we see the punishment of the suitors by Odysseus, an incident still further travestied in Grimm's legend of the King of the Golden Mountain. So too as we read of the body of Chundun Raja, which remained undecayed though he had been dead many months, or of Sodewa Bai, who a month after her death looked as lovely as on the night on which she died, we are reminded of the bodies of Patroklos and of Hektor 3 which Aphroditê or Apollon anointed with ambrosial oil, and guarded day and night from all unseemly things.

But though the doom of which Achilleus mournfully complained to Thetis lies on all or almost all of these bright beings, they cannot be held in the grasp of the dark power which has laid them low. Briar-Rose and Surya Bai start from their slumbers at the magic touch of the lover's hand, and even when all hope seemed to be lost, wise beasts provide an antidote which will bring back life to the dead. In the story of Panch Phul Ranee these beneficent physicians are jackals, who converse together like the owls of Luxman or the crows in the tale of Faithful John. "Do you see this tree?" says the jackal to his wife. "Well, if its leaves were crushed, and a little of the juice put into the raja's two ears and upon his upper lip, and some upon his temples also, and some upon the spear-wound in his side, he would come to life again, and be as well as ever." These leaves reappear in Grimm's story of the Three Snake Leaves, in which the snakes play the part of the jackals. In this tale a prince is buried alive with his dead wife, and seeing a snake approaching her body, he cuts it in three pieces. Presently another snake, crawling from the corner, saw the other lying dead, and going away soon returned with three green leaves in its mouth; then, laying the parts of the body together, so as to join, it put one leaf on each the Gaelic tale of the Sea-Maiden, Campbell, i. 101.

or stronghold of the robber demolished
than, like Odysseus, he begins to feel
an irresistible longing to see his father
and his home once more.

The story of Shortshanks is told in

208.

Od. xvi. 175, 207; xiii. 435; xxi. 2 Il. xix. 32. 3 lb. xxiv. 20.

« ÎnapoiContinuă »