Emilius is sent with a barrel to draw water; he only goes on account of the promise made him by his sister, that he will receive as a reward a pair of red boots.—This desire of the boy-hero, and of the girl-heroine, is spoken of in many popular songs, and among others, in a Piedmontese one, as yet unpublished. In the seventeenth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff,[377] the sister kills her brother, Little John, to possess herself of his red strawberries (as in the Esthonian tale), and his red little shoes. Upon his grave a fine cane grows; a shepherd makes a flute of it, and the flute, pressed to the lips, begins to emit the following lamentation:—
"Gently, gently, little shepherd, play;
Do not wound my heart!
My little sister, the traitress,
For the red little strawberries, for the red little shoes!"
When the flute is pressed to the sister's lips, instead of the word "little shepherd," it says, "Little sister, thou hast betrayed me,"[378] and her crime is thus discovered. These little red shoes are simply a variation of the slippers which are lost by the fugitive aurora, and found again by the sun, and which both wish to wear. (I refer to this myth the origin of the nuptial custom in Europe of maidens, towards the new year, throwing the slipper to know whether, during the next year, they will be married, and who is to be their husband.)[379] The slipper lost by the maiden, Little Mary (Masha, the Marion of Piedmontese and French legends), and found by the prince, also occurs in the Russian tales. In the thirtieth of the sixth book of Afanassieff, Little Mary's elder sister begins by trying on the slipper; but it is too small; the foot will not go in. Seeing this, Little Mary's step-mother advises her daughter to cut off her great toe, which would not enter; then the foot goes in, and the messengers of the prince lead the eldest sister away; but two doves fly after them and cry out, "Blood on her foot, blood on her foot." The deceit is discovered, and the eldest sister sent back; the prince causes his true and predestined bride, Little Mary, to be carried off. (This is the usual exchange of wives, upon which I have remarked in my "Essay on the Comparative History of Nuptial Usages," and of which the legend of Queen Berta is one of the most popular examples. The Russian Little Mary, like Cinderella, is at first of ugly aspect, and then beautiful. In the Russian story, the maiden becomes beautiful by mounting upon the stove. Sîtâ comes forth, beautiful in her innocence, passing through the fire; the morning aurora only seems beautiful when it passes through the flames of the Eastern sky. The stove brings us back to the interrupted story of the foolish and lazy Emilius (or Ivan).—On account, therefore, of the promise made to him of the red boots, he goes to the fountain with the barrel to draw water. In the fountain he catches a pike, who beseeches him to set him at liberty, and promises in return to make him fortunate. Being lazy, the greatest favour that he wishes for at this moment is that he may be helped to carry the barrel; the grateful pike performs the miracle of the barrel full of water which walks of its own accord. (I have already endeavoured to explain this myth: the cloud is represented as a barrel in the Vedic hymns; it moves on of its own accord; the barrel does the same; the hero, as long as he is shut up in the cloud, remains foolish; the barrel of the fool walks of itself.) Emilius is then sent to cut wood; by favour of the grateful pike, it is enough for him to send his hatchet, which cuts the wood of itself; the wood piles itself upon the waggon, and the waggon, without being drawn by any one, advances, passing or crushing whatever it meets; they endeavour to arrest its progress, when the trunk of an oak-tree detaches itself from the waggon, and, like a stick, beating on every side, sweeps the road (these are all curious variations of the walking forest or cloud). The Tzar then sends to invite him to court, and knowing his weak penchant for things of a red colour, he promises him a red robe, a red hat, and red boots. When the Tzar's envoys arrive, Emilius, like his alter ego Ivan Durak (Ivan the fool), is warming himself at the stove; grudging all trouble, he obtains from the pike the favour of being carried by the stove itself to the Tzar at court. The Tzar's daughter falls in love with him; the Tzar shuts the young couple up in a cask (the usual cloud-barrel, which occurs in the form of a little chest in other stories, a variation of the wooden dress), and has them thrown into the sea. Emilius, who was drunk in the cask, sleeps; the princess wakens him, and beseeches him to save her; by means of the pike, the cask comes to a beautiful island, where it breaks open; Emilius becomes handsome, rich, and happy in a beautiful palace with the young princess. (The aurora and the sun of evening are thrown together into the ocean of night, until they land on the happy isle of the east, where they reappear again together in all their splendour.) One of the most popular stupidities of the fool is that of letting the wine contained in the barrel flow out upon the ground, when he is left alone at home; in the Russian story, too, Ivan the fool leaves the beer that is fermenting in the barrel open (Indras with his lightning makes a hole in the cloud-barrel, and the rain comes out).[380]
The fool Ivan takes his good luck from the living, but he also does so from the dead. On account of having watched three nights by the tomb of his father, his luck begins,[381] the shade of his father having blessed him; but, as the dead bring good luck (a belief which, at any rate, has always been entertained by the heirs of rich men deceased), the third brother speculates on the body of his own mother. We do not know whether he does so out of pure simplicity, or with some hidden and far-seeing design, presumable from the ease with which he exchanges the character of a fool for that of a cunning schemer (the first Brutus of popular tradition). In the seventeenth story of Erlenwein, after he has carried a treasure home, by selling his ox to the tree, and then cutting down the tree, which contains money, he always guards his money, and sleeps upon it. His brothers know this, and resolve to go and kill him. But that very night, the third, the foolish brother, leaves his mother in charge of the treasure; the brothers come and kill his mother by mistake, instead of him. He turns up, and threatens to give them up to justice; they bribe him with a hundred roubles to keep silence. Then the third brother takes his mother's body and carries it into the middle of the road, in order that a merchant's waggon may crush it; when this happens, he accuses the merchant of murder, until the latter gives him a hundred more roubles to say nothing about it. He then comes to a village by night with his mother's corpse; he places it against a peasant's door, and knocks at the window; the peasant opens the door, the body falls, and the peasant treads upon it, upon which the so-called stupid son cries out that he has killed his mother, and receives another hundred roubles, on promise of silence. Then the two elder brothers, finding that it is possible to speculate upon corpses, and make one's fortune, kill their wives, and go to town with their bodies; they are immediately arrested and put into prison.
The law of atavism evolves itself in the generation of the heroes of mythical legends, no less than in that of simple mortals upon earth. Of a stupid father is born a wise son, and then the wise son in turn has a foolish one. I do not as yet know how to explain this singular fact of natural history; its appearance in mythology, however, is not difficult to understand. To the luminous day succeeds the gloomy night, and then again to the dark night the luminous day; to summer succeeds winter, and to winter summer; to white black, and to black white; to heat cold, and to cold heat.
On this account, in legends, when the mother is intelligent, the son, generally speaking, is silly; whereas, when the mother is silly,[382] the son is usually intelligent.
In the fifth story of the sixth book of Afanassieff, a soldier enters the house of a woman, while her son is travelling, and induces her to believe that he has just returned from hell, where he had seen her son employed in taking the storks to pasture, and greatly in want of money; the soldier says that he is about to return to hell, and will be happy to take with him whatever the woman wishes to send to her son. The credulous woman gives him some money, directing him to take it immediately to hell, and give it to her poor child. The soldier disappears, and shortly afterwards the woman's son returns home; his mother is greatly astonished at his appearance, and tells him how she has been deceived; he gets angry and leaves the house again, swearing never to return till he finds some one more foolish than his mother. He is a skilful thief; he steals from a lady, whilst her husband is absent, a hog with its little pigs, and puts them in safe concealment; the husband returns, hears what has taken place, and follows the thief with a carriage and horses. The robber hears him coming; squats down on the ground, takes off his hat, and pretends to be covering with it a bird or a falcon, which wishes to escape. The husband comes and asks him if he has seen the robber; the latter answers that he has seen him, but that he is a long way off, and that the roads by which he can be overtaken are many and winding. The husband, who, perhaps, does not know the proverb which says, "Who wishes, let him go; who wishes not, let him send," asks the robber to overtake the fugitive; the thief demurs, saying that he has under his hat a falcon, which cost his master three hundred roubles, and that it may escape. The gentleman promises to take care of it, and if the falcon escapes, to pay the three hundred roubles. The thief does not believe his promise, and desires the three hundred roubles in pledge of his good faith; the gentleman gives them, and the thief goes off with the carriage, the horses, and the three hundred roubles. The gentleman stays till evening looking at the hat, waiting for his friend to return; at last he loses patience, wants to see what there is under the hat, and finds nothing—but a proof of his own stupidity.[383]
Ivan (John), and oftener still Vaniusha (Little John, the Giovannino of Italian legends), distinguishes himself, not only by his thieving accomplishments, but also by his courage. In order to play the part of a thief, as Little John does in all the Indo-Europeans legends, not only industry, but courage must be called into requisition; hence he acquires, like the Chevalier Bayard, the good reputation of a hero without fear and without reproach. The hero Ivan is now the son of a king, now of a merchant, and now of a peasant; the merchants wished, no less than the peasants, to appropriate to themselves the most popular hero of tradition. In the forty-sixth story of the fifth book of Afanassieff, neither the shades of night, nor brigands, nor death, can make the hero afraid; but he is terrified and dies, falling into the water, when the little iersh (the perch) leaps upon his stomach, whilst he is asleep in his fishing-boat. In the Tuscan story,[384] the fearless hero Giovannino, after having confronted every kind of danger, dies from the terror the sight of his own shadow inspires him with. In the same way, in the Ṛigvedas, the god Indras, terrified at his own shadow, or, probably, that of his dead enemy, takes to flight after the killing of the serpent Ahis.[385]
The following heroes are also variations of Prince Ivan, Ivan the son of the cow, Ivan the peasant's son, Ivan the merchant's son, and the cunning Ivan:—1st, Alessino Papović, the son of the priest (it is well known that the Russian priests are not bound to celibacy), who kills Tugarin, the son of the serpent, by prayer, that is, by praying to the Holy Mother of God, to order the black cloud to cause drops of rain to fall on the monster's wings, upon which the son of the serpent, like the Vedic Ahis, when Indras opens a way for the rivers to come out, instantly falls to the ground;[386] 2d, Baldak, son of Boris, the boy seven years old, who succeeds in spitting in the Sultan's face—(I have already remarked, in the preface to this work, that the king of the Turks is, in the Slavonic tradition, as well as in that of Persia, the representative of the devil; the demon, when the hero approaches, smells the odour of human flesh in India, of Christian flesh in Western stories,[387] and of Russian flesh in Russian fairy tales)—but who afterwards becomes the Sultan's prisoner, because he appears to the third daughter of the latter with a star under his heel, or shows his heel (which is the vulnerable part of both hero and monster); 3d, Basil Bes-ćiastnoi, who goes, by his father-in-law's order, into the kingdom of the serpent, in order to receive a gift from him, with adventures similar to those of the young Plavaćek in Bohemian stories, when he goes to seek the three golden hairs of the old Vsieveda (the all-seeing, the Vedic sun Viçvavedas);[388] 4th, The third brother who exchanges two sacks of flies and gnats he has caught for good cattle.[389] The same hero takes the name of Little Thomas Berennikoff; being blind of one eye, he kills an army of flies, and boasts of having killed an army of heroes; he thus dishonestly gains the reputation of being a hero, and is fortunate in having an opportunity offered him of proving his bravery by killing a monster-serpent, who, out of foolhardiness, shuts both eyes when he sees that Thomas has but one; he afterwards destroys an army of Chinese with the trunk of a tree, rooted up by his indomitable horse, which a real hero had bound to the tree;[390] 5th, The cunning rogue, Little Thomas (Thomka; the quacks in Piedmont are accustomed to give the name of Tommasino to the little devil which they conjure out of a phial), who, by means of disguises, cheats and robs the priest;[391] 6th, The third brother who does not suffer himself to be put to sleep by the witch (as we have seen above the third sister who keeps one of her three eyes open);[392] 7th, The famous robber, Klimka,[393] who, by means of a drum (in Indian tales a trumpet), terrifies his accomplices, the robbers, and takes their money, and then steals from a gentleman his horse, his casket of jewels, and even his wife; 8th, The Cossack who delivers the maiden from the flames, and carries her to his golden house, where there are two other maidens (be it understood, the one in the silver house, and the other in that of copper); from which three maidens the Cossack receives a shirt which renders him invulnerable, a sword which produces the most marvellous effects in slaughtering men, and a purse which, when shaken, drops money;[394] 9th, The celebrated Ilia Muromietz (Elias of Murom), round whom, as also around Svetazór and Svyatogor (holy mount), Dobrynia Nikitić, and the heroes of Vladimir, is grouped an entire heroic Russian epic poem.[395] Other variations of the same hero are the son of the merchant given up to be educated by the devil, who teaches him every kind of craft; the boy Basil, who understands the language of birds, and who makes his parents serve him;[396] the merchant or son of a peasant,[397] who, because he prefers good advice to money, acquires a fortune; the virtuous workman, who receives by way of pay for his labour only three kapeika, which, spent in good works, enables him at last to marry the king's daughter, or the princess who did not laugh.[398]
The legend of the hero Ivan has yet other interesting forms, reflective of the beautiful Vedic myth of the Açvinâu, who into their flying chariot-vessel also take up the unhappy. In Afanassieff,[399] the third brother, thought to be foolish, is ill-treated by his parents, who dress and feed him badly. The king issues a proclamation, that whoever can make a flying vessel will obtain his daughter to wife. The mother sends forth her three sons in quest of the necessary enchantment; to her third son she gives a little brown bread and water, whilst the two eldest go provided with good white loaves and some brandy. The fool meets on the way a poor old man, salutes him, and begins to share with him his scanty store of food; the old man transmutes his brown bread into white, and his water into brandy, and then advises him to enter the forest, to make the sign of the cross upon the first tree he finds, and to strike it with his axe; then to throw himself on the ground and stay there until he wakens; he will see a vessel ready before him: "Sit down in it," added the old man, "and fly whither your behest requires you; and by the way take up beside you as many as you meet."[400] This chariot is freighted with abundance, both to eat and to drink; the young man overtakes several needy beggars, and invites them up into the chariot; he receives only poor people, not a single rich man.[401] But these poor men afterwards show their gratitude to the hero, and help him in other adventures imposed upon him by the Tzar, who hopes by this means to get rid of a son-in-law of such vulgar origin. One of the new tasks imposed requires him to eat twelve oxen, and to drink at one gulp forty barrels of wine; in this he is helped by Eating (Abiédalo) and by Drinking (Apiválo), whom he had entertained in his chariot-ship, and who eat and drink instead of him.[402] At last he comes to claim and marry the young princess. (The hero-sun, taken up into the chariot of the Açvinâu, by the grace of the Açvinâu, invoked by him in danger, is delivered, and espouses the aurora.)