No. 16.—The Apples of Pregnancy
There were where there were a king and a queen. Now for sixteen years that king and that queen had had no sons or daughters. So he thought they would never have any. And he was always weeping and lamenting, for what would become of them without any children? Then the king said to the queen, ‘O queen, I will go away and leave you, and if I do not find a son born of you by my return, know that either I will kill you with my own hands, or I will send you away, and live no longer with you.’
Then another king sent a challenge to him to go and fight, for, if he goes not, he will come and slay him on his throne. Then the king said to his queen, ‘Here, O queen, is a challenge come for me to go and fight. If I had had a son, would he not have gone, and I have remained at home?’
She said, ‘How can I help it, O king, if God has not chosen to give us any sons? What can I do?’
He said, ‘Prate not to me of God. If I come and don’t find a son born of you, I shall kill you.’
And the king departed.
Then the holy God and St. Peter fell to discussing what they should do for the queen. So God said to Peter, ‘Here, you Peter, go down with this apple, and pass before her window, and cry, “I have an apple, and whoso eats of it will conceive.” She will hear you. For it were a pity, Peter, for the king to come and kill her.’ [[66]]
So St. Peter took the apple, and came down, and did as God had told him. He cried in front of the queen’s window. She heard him, and came out, and called him to her, and asked, ‘How much do you want for that apple, my man?’
He said, ‘I want much; give me a purse of money.’
And the queen took the purse of money, and gave it him, and took the apple and ate it. And when she had eaten it, she conceived. And St. Peter left her the purse of money there. So the time drew near for her to bear a child. And the very day that she brought forth her son, his father came from the war, and he had won the fight. So when he came home and heard that the queen had borne him a son, he went to the wine-shop and drank till he was drunk. And as he was coming home from the wine-shop, he reached the door, and fell down, and died. Then the boy heard it, and rose up out of his mother’s arms, and went to the vintner, and killed him with a blow. And he came home. And the people, the nobles, beheld him, what a hero he was, and wondered at him. But an evil eye fell on him, and for three days he took to his bed. And he died of the evil eye.
Two other Roumanian-Gypsy stories may be compared with this one—No. 10 and ‘The Prince who ate Men,’ where, likewise, a king has no son, threatens the queen with death, and goes off to the war. The queen goes out driving, and meets a little bit of a man who follows her home, gives her a glass of medicine, and vanishes. She conceives, and bears a son, ‘half dog, half bear, and half man.’ The father returns victorious, and is going to slay this monster, till he learns who he is. Afterwards the monster takes to eating sentinels, until he himself is slain by a hero. Fruits of pregnancy are very common in Indian folk-tales, and God plays much the same part there. For instance, in ‘Chandra’s Vengeance’ (Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days, pp. 253–4), Mahadeo gives a mango-fruit to a sterile woman, and she bears a child. Cf. also Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, pp. 42, 91; Knowles’s Folk-tales of Kashmir, p. 416 note; Hahn, Nos. 4, 6, etc.; and the English-Gypsy story, ‘De Little Fox,’ No. 52.
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[1] Kláka. ‘Claca,’ says Grenville Murray, ‘signifies a species of assembly very popular in Wallachia. If any family has some particular work to do on any particular account, they invite the neighbourhood to come and work for them. When the work is completed there is high glee, singing and dancing, and story-telling.’—Doine; or, Songs and Legends of Roumania (Lond. 1854), p. 109 n. [↑]
[2] In Wlislocki, p. 104 note, the devil has a duck’s foot. In F. A. Steel’s Indian Wide-awake Stories, p. 54, the hero detects a ghost by her feet being set on hind part before. [↑]
[3] On p. 110 Dr. Barbu Constantinescu gives a long and terrific formula for bewitching with the evil eye. [↑]
[4] The notion of a dead girl turning into a flower is very common in Indian folk-tales. Cf. Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, pp. 145, 149, 244, 247, 248, 252, etc.; and Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days, No. 6, ‘Little Surya Bai,’ pp. 79–93. [↑]
[5] Dá pes pe sherésti, lit. gave, or threw, herself on her head. In Gypsy stories this undignified proceeding almost invariably precedes every transformation. Cf. [[17]]‘The Red King and the Witch,’ ‘The Snake who became the King’s Son-in-law,’ ‘Tropsyn,’ etc. [↑]
[6] For golden boy cf. Dr. Barbu Constantinescu’s own ‘The Golden Children,’ No. 18, also Hahn, ii. 293. The two apples seem to be birth-marks. [↑]
[7] For the bursting of monsters, cf. Dasent’s Tales from the Norse, pp. 27, 240; and Ralston, p. 130. [↑]
[8] Our queen’s great-great-great-grandfather, George I., was a firm believer in the vampire superstition (Horace Walpole’s Letters, vol. i. p. cix.). [↑]
[9] Cf. Grimm, No. 56, ‘Sweetheart Roland,’ i. 226. [↑]
[10] i.e. Pretend to be ill. English Gypsies employ the same phrase alike in Rómani and in English. [↑]
[12] See note on No. 6, ‘God’s Godson.’ [↑]
[13] Baldpate makes the same remark in No. 2, p. 8, but the conventional answer is wanting there. [↑]
[14] So I had written; but I have since read Maive Stokes’ story of ‘The Demon conquered by the King’s Son’ (Indian Fairy Tales, No. 24, pp. 173 and 288). Here it is the demon step-mother, who, pretending her eyes are bad, sends the hero to fetch tigress’s milk, an eagle’s feather, night-growing rice and water from the Glittering Well. He speaks, however, of her as his ‘mother.’ e.g. on p. 180. Compare ‘The Son of Seven Mothers’ in F. A. Steel’s Indian Wide-awake Stories, pp. 98–110, and Knowles’ Folk-tales of Kashmir, pp. 1 and 42. [↑]
[15] There is obviously an omission, at this point, of a wager or something of that sort. [↑]
[17] See footnote 2 on p. 16. [↑]
[18] Clearly Mr. Mayhew was no folklorist. The boy’s claim to have invented the story is worth noting. [↑]
[19] The Roumanian-Gypsy word is Baht, which in one form or another (bakht, bahi, bok, bachí, etc.) occurs in every Gypsy dialect—Turkish, Russian, Scandinavian, German, English, Spanish, etc., and which Pott derives from the Sanskrit (ii. 398–9). But the curious point is that in Dozon’s Contes Albanais (1881), p. 60, we get ‘Va trouver ma Fortune,’ and a footnote explains, ‘Fortune, en turc bakht, espèce de génie protecteur.’ Paspati, again, in his Turkish-Gypsy vocabulary (1870), p. 155, gives—‘Bakht, n.f. fortune, sort, hasard.… Les Grecs et les Turcs se servent très souvent du même mot’; and Miklosich, too, cites the Modern Greek μπάκτι (Ueber die Mundarten, vii. 14). The occurrence of this Gypsy word as a loan-word in Modern Greek and Turkish is suggestive of a profound influence of the Gypsies on the folklore of the Balkan Peninsula. Bakht, fortune, is also good Persian. [↑]
[20] This is a little puzzling, but it must mean that all the speeches seemingly by the princess were really made by the watchmaker—that he maintained the dialogue. [↑]
[22] This is the first real remark on the part of the princess, who, woman-like, cannot stand a stupid male remark about the price of a dress. [↑]
[23] This change from the third to the second person is in the original. [↑]
[24] What ‘pearly hay’ is I know not, but it stands so in the original. [↑]
[25] The last four words fairly beat me, but such seems their literal meaning. In the Roumanian rendering, ‘le-a facut doue mere.’ [↑]