Wilson (Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 169, note,) observes that “the story is told almost in the same words in the Bahár Dánish, a purse being substituted for the rod; Jahándár obtains possession of it, as well as the cup, and slippers in a similar manner. Weber [Eastern Romances, Introduction, p. 39] has noticed the analogy which the slippers bear to the cap of Fortunatus. The inexhaustible purse, although not mentioned here, is of Hindu origin also, and a fraudulent representative of it makes a great figure in one of the stories of the Daśa Kumára Charita” [ch. 2, see also L. Deslongchamps Essai sur les Fables Indiennes, Paris, 1838, p. 35 f. and Grässe, Sagen des Mittelalters, Leipzig, 1842, p. 19 f.] The additions between brackets are due to Dr. Reinholdt Rost the editor of Wilson’s Essays.
The Mongolian form of the story may be found in Sagas from the Far East, p. 24. A similar incident is also found in the Swedish story in Thorpe’s Scandinavian Tales, entitled “the Beautiful Palace East of the Sun and North of the Earth.” A youth acquires boots by means of which he can go a hundred miles at every step, and a cloak, that renders him invisible, in a very similar way.
I find that in the notes in Grimm’s 3rd Volume, page 168, (edition of 1856) the passage in Somadeva is referred to, and other parallels given. The author of these notes compares a Swedish story in Cavallius, p. 182, and Pröhle, Kindermärchen, No. 22. He also quotes from the Sidi Kür, the story to which I have referred in Sagas from the Far East, and compares a Norwegian story in Ashbjörnsen, pp. 53, 171, a Hungarian story in Mailath and Gaal, N. 7, and an Arabian tale in the continuation of the 1001 Nights. See also Sicilianische Märchen by Laura Gonzenbach, Part I, Story 31. Here we have a table-cloth, a purse, and a pipe. When the table-cloth is spread out one has only to say—Dear little table-cloth, give macaroni or roast-meat or whatever may be required, and it is immediately present. The purse will supply as much money as one asks it for, and the pipe is something like that of the pied piper of Hamelin,—every one who hears it must dance. Dr. Köhler in his notes, at the end of Laura Gonzenbach’s collection, compares (besides the story of Fortunatus, and Grimm III. 202,) Zingerle, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, II. 73 and 193. Curze, Popular Traditions from Waldock, p. 34. Gesta Romanorum, Chap. 120. Campbell’s Highland Tales, No. 10, and many others. The shoes in our present story may also be compared with the bed in the IXth Novel of the Xth day of the Decameron.
See also Ralston’s Russian Folk-Tales, p. 230 and Veckenstedt’s Wendische Sagen, p. 152.
See also the story of “Die Kaiserin Trebisonda” in a collection of South Italian tales by Woldemar Kaden, entitled “Unter den Olivenbäumen” and published in 1880. The hero of this story plays the same trick as Putraka, and gains thereby an inexhaustible purse, a pair of boots which enable the wearer to run like the wind, and a mantle of invisibility. See also “Beutel, Mäntelchen und Wunderhorn” in the same collection, and No. XXII in Miss Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales. The story is found in the Avadánas translated by Stanislas Julien: (Lévêque, Mythes et Légendes de L’Inde et de la Perse, p. 570, Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 117.) M. Lévêque thinks that La Fontaine was indebted to it for his Fable of L’ Huître et les Plaideurs. See also De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, Vol. I, pp. 126–127, and 162.
We find a magic ring, brooch and cloth in No. XLIV of the English Gesta. See also Syrische Sagen und Märchen, von Eugen Prym und Albert Socin, p. 79, where there is a flying carpet. There is a magic table-cloth in the Bohemian Story of Büsmanda, (Waldau, p. 44) and a magic pot on p. 436 of the same collection; and a food-providing mesa in the Portuguese story of A Cacheirinha (Coelho, Contos Portuguezes, p. 58). In the Pentamerone No. 42 there is a magic chest. Kuhn has some remarks on the “Tischchen deck dich” of German tales in his Westfälische Märchen, Vol. I, p. 369.
For a similar artifice to Putraka’s, see the story entitled Fischer-Märchen in Gaal, Märchen der Magyaren, p. 168, Waldau, Böhmische Märchen, pp. 260 and 564, and Dasent’s Norse Tales, pp. 213 and 214.
[10] Compare the way in which Zauberer Vergilius carries off the daughter of the Sulṭán of Babylon, and founds the town of Naples, which he makes over to her and her children: (Simrock’s Deutsche Volksbücher, Vol. VI, pp. 354, 355.) Dunlop is of opinion that the mediæval traditions about Vergil are largely derived from Oriental sources.
[11] I. e., infantry, cavalry, elephants, and archers.