[61] Pitré, No. 188; Crane, p. 127. Gonzenbach, 65, Conte Piro. In Gonzenbach, the man does not kill the fox, which pretends to be dead, and is bilked of its promised reward, a grand funeral.
[62] Lou Compaire Gatet, 'Father Cat,' Revue des Langues Romanes, iii. 396. See Deulin, Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye, p. 205.
[63] Boukoutchi Khan, translated into German by Schiefner. Mémoires de l'Académie de St. Pétersbourg, 1873. With Dr. Köhler's Notes.
[64] Gubernatis. Zoological Mythology, ii. 136. Quoting Afanassieff, iv. 11. Compare a similar snake in Swahili.
[65] Pantschatantra, i. 222.
[66] The work of M. Cosquin's referred to throughout is his valuable Contes de Lorraine, Paris, 1886. A crowd of Puss in Boots stories are referred to by Dr. Köhler in Gonzenbach's Sicilianische Märchen, ii. 243 (Leipzig, 1870). They are Finnish, Bulgarian, Russian, and South Siberian. The Swahili and Hindu versions appear to have been unknown, in 1870, to Dr. Köhler. In 1883, Mr. Ralston, who takes the Buddhist side, did not know the Indian version (Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1883).
Les Fées.
Toads and Diamonds.
The origin of this little story is so manifestly moral, that there is little need to discuss it. A good younger sister behaves kindly to a poor old woman, who, being a fairy, turns all her words into flowers and diamonds. The wicked elder sister treats the fairy with despite: her words become toads and serpents, and the younger marries a king's son.
The preference shown to the youngest child is discussed in the note on Cinderella. M. Deulin asks whether Toads and Pearls is connected with the legend of Latona (Leto) and the peasants whom she changed into frogs, for refusing to allow her to drink[67]. Latona really wished to bathe her children, and the two narratives have probably no connection, though rudeness is punished in both. Nor is there a closer connection with the tales in which tears (like the tears of Wainamoinen in the Kalewala) change into pearls. It is an obvious criticism that the elder girl should have met the fairy first; she was not likely to behave so rudely when she knew that politeness would be rewarded. The natural order of events occurs in Grimm's Golden Goose (64), where the eldest and the second son refuse to let the old man taste their cake and wine. Here, as in a tale brought by M. Deulin from French Flanders, the polite youngest son, by virtue of a Golden Goose, makes a very serious princess laugh, and wins her for his wife. Turning on a similar moral conception Grimm's Mother Holle (24) is infinitely better than Les Fées. The younger daughter drops her shuttle down a well; she is sent after it, and reaches a land where apples speak and say, 'Shake us, we are all ripe.' She does all she is asked to do, and makes Mother Holle's feather-bed so well that the feathers (snow-flakes) fly about the world. She goes home covered with golden wages, and her elder sister follows her, but not her example. She insults the apples, is lazy at Mother Holle's, and is sent home covered with pitch. Grimm gives many variants. Mlle. L'Heritier amplifies the tale in her Bigarrures (1696). The story begins to be more exciting, when it is combined, as commonly happens, with that of the substituted bride. It is odd enough that the Kaffirs have the incident of the good and bad girl, the bad girl laughs at the trees, as in Grimm's she mocks the apples (Theal, Kaffir Folklore, p. 49). This tale (in which there is no miracle of uttering toads or pearls) diverges into that of the Snake Husband, a rude Beauty and the Beast. The Zulus again have the story of the substituted bride ('Ukcombekcantsini,' Callaway's Nursery Tales of the Zulus, Natal, 1868). The idea recurs in Theal's Kaffir Collection (p. 136); in both cases the substituted bride is a beast. In Scotland the story of the Black Bull o' Norroway contains the incident of the substituted bride. The Kaffirs, in The Wonderful Horns, have a large part of that story, but without the substituted bride, who, in Europe, occasionally attaches herself as a sequel to Toads and Diamonds. This is illustrated especially in Grimm's Three Dwarfs in the Wood (13), where the good girl's speech is made literally golden. The bad girl, who speaks toads, marries the king's son who loves the good girl. Fragments of verse, in which the good girl tries to warn her husband, resemble those in the Black Bull o' Norroway. The tale is complicated by the metamorphosis of the true bride (no great change her lover would say) into 'a little duck.' She regains her shape when a sword is swung over her. The bad girl is tortured like Regulus. This is Bushy-bride in Dasent's Tales from the Norse.