The hero's horse, like the hero himself, begins by being ugly, deformed, and inept, and ends by becoming beautiful, luminous, heroic, and victorious. The mythical horse of the Hungarians, the horse Tátos, or Tátos lo, when born, is of an ugly aspect, defective and lean; it is therefore said in Hungarian, that "the Tátos comes out of a defective horse." It is, however, always born with teeth,[547] although its chin is sometimes wanting; its bursts out of a black pentagonal egg on an Ash Wednesday, after the hero has carried it for seven summers and seven winters under his arm. In the Mahâbhâratam,[548] the first created horse Uććâiḥçravas, the king of the horses (and therefore the horse of Indras), which is as swift as thought, follows the path of the sun, and is luminous and white, has, however, a black tail, made so by the magic of the serpents, who have covered it with black hairs. This is probably the black ass's or horse's tail which remains upon the ugly or wicked sister's forehead, in the popular European story of the two sisters.[549] It must also be remarked that, as the word Uććâiḥçravas means, properly, him of the high ears, it indicates the ass better than the horse.
In the same way, therefore, as the hero of popular tales before becoming a wise man is generally an ass, the animal ridden by the solar hero, prior to being a real and noble horse, is usually a worthless jade, or a dark-coloured ass. The sun, in the beginning of the night, rides a black horse, and afterwards a grey one, or else an ass or a mule, but in the morning, on the contrary, a white and luminous horse, which has a black tail; or else the dark horse of night has a white head, or white legs, or anterior parts of the body, with golden ears, and the nape of the neck formed of pearls.[550] The monstrous Trojan horse too, of Epeios, a figure which represents the horse of mythology, in Tryphiodôros the Egyptian,[551] has a golden mane, red eyes, and silver teeth.
In the Turkish stories of Siberia,[552] it is upon an iron-coloured horse that the third brother, hated by his father and his two elder brothers, advances against the demon Ker Iutpa. The hero becomes the excrement of a horse, and the horse a crow; the former glues the monster's lower lip to the earth, the latter suspends his upper lip to the sky. In order better to understand this strange myth, we must remember that the name of one of the Valkiries is "Mist," a word which means excrement and fog. The fog, or frost, or rain, or dew, falls to the ground; the solar horse, or the sun, rises in the sky; the monster of night or of clouds is dispersed.
In the thirteenth Esthonian story of Kreutzwald, the third brother comes three times to deliver the princess from the mountain of glass (or ice), where she sleeps. The first time he is dressed the colour of bronze, upon a bronze-coloured horse; the second time dressed in silver, upon a horse the colour of silver; and the third time upon a gold-coloured horse, dressed in gold.
In an unpublished Piedmontese story, the young prince, whose beloved princess has been ravished beyond seas, is borne over the waves by an eagle, which he feeds with his own flesh. Arrived beyond the sea, he hears that the princess is destined to be the wife of the hero who wins the race three times; the first time he appears dressed in black, upon a black horse; the second time dressed in white, upon a white horse; and the third time dressed in red, upon a red horse. Each time he wins the race, and thereafter receives the beautiful princess in marriage.
Thus we see the first horse of the hero is always dark-coloured, like the devil's horse, like the horses of Pluto, which, accustomed to darkness, are terrified by light;[553] it then becomes the grey horse of the giantess, the grey horse which smells the dead hero Sigurd in the Edda. Pêgasos himself, the hieros hippos of Aratos, is born semi-perfect (êmitelês),[554] an expression which reminds me of the equus dimidius of an Alsatian paper of 1336, in Du Cange, by which the mule is meant. The Hindoo Aruṇas, charioteer of the sun (or even the brother of the sun himself, inasmuch as he is the brother of Garuḍas, the solar bird), is said to be born with an imperfect body;[555] he can be luminous and divine only in part. The black horse, on the contrary, has generally an evil and demoniacal nature; the black horse corresponds to the black devil; the colour black itself is, according to popular superstition, the product of bad humours.[556] Every horse, when born, has, according to Maestro Agostino, a piece of black flesh upon its lips, called hippomanes by the Greeks: "La quale carne dici lo vulgo essere molto sospettosa a li maleficii." Maestro Agostino adds, moreover, that the mother refuses to give suck to the colt as long as it carries this piece of flesh upon its lips, and some say that the mother herself eats it. In an idyll of Theokritos, we read that the Hippomanes is born among the Arcadians, and maddens colts and swift mares.[557] In the first chapter we mentioned the Russian damavoi, the demon who, during the night, rides upon cows, oxen, and horses, and makes them perspire. This superstition was already combated in Italy in the sixteenth century by Maestro Agostino;[558] and to it can probably be traced the custom, still observed by many grooms, of leaving a lamp lighted in the stable during the night. The devil, as is well known, is afraid of the light (Agnis is called rakshohan, or monster-killer), and his black horse likewise. It is therefore a sinister omen, according to two verses in Suidas,[559] to dream of black horses, whilst, on the contrary, it is a good omen to dream of white ones. In the Norman legend of the priest Walchelm, a black horse presents itself to him in the first days of January of the year 1091, and tempts him to mount upon its back; scarcely has Walchelm done so, than the black horse sets off for hell.[560] The dead, too, according to the popular belief, often ride upon black or demoniacal horses.[561]
A well-known Russian story in verse, the Kaniok Garbunok, or Little Hump-backed Horse, of Jershoff, commences thus:—An old man has three sons, the youngest of which is the usual Ivan Durák, or Ivan the fool. The old man finds his corn-field devastated every morning; he wishes to find out who the devastator is, and sends his first-born son to watch the first night. The first-born has drunk too much, and falls asleep, and so does the second son, and from the same cause, on the second night. On the third night it is Ivan's turn to watch; he does not fall asleep. At midnight he sees a mare which breathes flames coming. Ivan ties her by a rope, leaps upon her, seizes her by the mane, torments and subdues her, until the mare, to be let free, promises to give Ivan one of her young ones, and carries him to the stable where her three young ones are. She gives Ivan a little hump-backed horse with long ears (the Hindoo Uććâiḥsravas), that flies. By means of this little hump-backed horse, Ivan will make his fortune; when he leads it away, the mare and the two other colts follow it. Ivan's two brothers steal the mare and two colts, and go to sell them to the Sultan. Ivan rejoins them, and the three brothers stay in the Sultan's service as grooms; sometime afterwards, Ivan saves himself from drowning by means of his horse.
In the third of Erlenwein's Russian stories, a stallion is born to the Tzar's mare, that had drunk the water in which a certain fish (a pike, in the nineteenth story) had been washed, at the same time as the Tzar's daughter and her maid give birth to two heroes, Ivan Tzarević and Ivan Diević—i.e., John of the Tzar and John of the girl, a form representing the Açvinâu. Ivan Tzarević rides upon the stallion. In the nineteenth story, the son of the mare is called Demetrius of the Tzar (Dmitri Tzarević); hero and horse being identified. In the fifth story of Erlenwein, a Cossack goes into the forest, where he is betrayed into the enemy's hands, who gives orders that he be cut in pieces, put into a sack, and attached to his horse. The horse starts, and carries him to the house of silver and gold, where he is resuscitated. During the following night, an old man and woman, whose guest the Cossack is, drag him, in order to waken him, by the cross which hangs on his neck, and he is thus transformed into a horse of gold and silver. Towards evening, the horse, by the Tzar's order, is killed, and (like the bull and the cow) becomes an apple-tree of silver and gold. The apple-tree is cut down, and becomes a golden duck. The golden duck is the same as the golden horse, or as the hero resuscitated, i.e., the morning sun. The sack and the horse which carry the hero cut in pieces represent the voyage of the sun in the gloom of night, or the voyage of the grey horse, the imperfect horse, the bastard mule, or the ass.
In the Russian tales, moreover, a distinction is made between the grey and the black horse; the grey horse helps the hero in the night very effectively, and the black one, on the contrary, is the herald of death. When, in the ninth story of Erlenwein, the horse of Ivan the merchant's son goes to search for the horses of the princess from beyond the sea, Ivan waits for him upon the shore. If he sees grey horses come forth, it is to be a sign that his own steed is alive; but if, on the other hand, black horses appear, he is to conclude that his own horse is dead. Grey is the colour of sadness, black is the colour of death.