Here, it may be said, there is nothing of Cendrillon, except that rich garments, miraculously furnished, help to make a marriage; and that the person thus aided was the victim of a stepmother. No doubt this is not much, but we might sum up Cendrillon thus. The victim of a stepmother makes a great marriage by dint of goodly garments supernaturally provided.
In Cendrillon the recognition (ἀναγνὠρισις) makes a great part of the interest. There is no ἀναγνὠρισις in the Kaffir legend, which is very short, being either truncated or undeveloped.
Let us now turn to the Santals, a remote and shy non-Aryan hill-tribe of India. Here we find the ἀναγνὠρισις, but in a form not only disappointing but almost cynical[72].
In the Santal story we have the cruel Stepmother, the hero,—not a heroine, but a boy,—the protecting and friendly Cow, the attempt to kill the Cow, the Flight, the great good-fortune of the hero, the Princess who falls in love with a lock of his hair, which is to play the part of Cinderella's glass slipper in the ἀναγνὠρισις, and, finally, a cynically devised accident, by which the beauty of the hair is destroyed, and the hero's chance of pleasing the princess perishes. It will be noticed that the use of a lock of hair floating down a river, to be fallen in love with and help the dénouement, is found, first, in the Egyptian conte of the Two Brothers, written down in the reign of Ramses II., fourteen hundred years before our era.
In that story, too, the hero has a friendly cow, which warns him when he is in danger of being murdered. But the Egyptian story has no other connection with Cendrillon[73]. The device of a floating lock of hair is not uncommon in Bengali Märchen.
From the Santals let us turn to another race, not so remote, but still non-Aryan, the Finns[74]. That the Santals borrow Märchen from their Hinduised aboriginal neighbours is not certain, but is perfectly possible and even probable. Though some theorists have denied that races borrow nursery tales from each other, it is certain that Lönnrot, writing to Schiefner in 1855, mentions a Finnish fisher who, meeting Russian and Swedish fishers, 'swopped stories' with them when stormy weather made it impossible to put to sea[75]. No doubt similar borrowings have always been going on when the peasantry on the frontiers met their neighbours, and where Kaffirs have taken Hottentot wives, or Sidonians have carried off Greek children as captives, in fact, all through the national and tribal meetings of the world [76].
The Wonderful Birch (Emmy Schreck, ix.) is a form of Cinderella from Russian Carelia. The story has a singularly dramatic and original opening. A man and his wife had but one daughter, and one Sheep. The Sheep wandered away, the woman sought him in the woods, and she met a witchwife. The witchwife turned the woman into the semblance of the Sheep, and herself took the semblance of the woman. She went to the woman's house, where the husband thought he was welcoming his own wife and the sheep that was lost. The new and strange stepmother demanded the death of the Sheep, which was the real mother of the heroine. Warned by the Sheep, a black sheep, the daughter did not taste of her flesh, but gathered and buried the bones and fragments. Thence grew a beautiful birch tree. The man and the witchwife went to court, the witchwife leaving the girl to accomplish impossible tasks. The voice of the dead mother from the grave below the birch bade the girl break a twig from the tree, and therewith accomplish the tasks. Then out of the earth came beautiful raiment (as in Peau d'Ane), and the girl dressed, and went to court. The Prince falls in love with her, and detects her by means of her ring, which takes the part of the slipper. Then comes in the frequent formula of a false bride substituted by the witchwife, a number of trials, and the punishment of the witch.
Here, then, the friendly beast is but the Mother surviving in two shapes, first as a sheep, then as a tree, exactly the idea of the ancient Egyptian story of the Two Brothers, where Bitiou first becomes a bull, and then a persea tree[77]. In Finnish the Cinderella plot is fully developed. A similar tale, still with the beast in place of the Fairy Godmother, is quoted by Mr. Ralston from the Servian (Vuk Karajich, No. 32). Three maidens were spinning near a cleft in the ground, when an old man warned them not to let their spindles fall into the cleft, or their mother would be changed into a cow. Mara's spindle fell in, and the mother instantly shared the fate of Io. Mara tended the cow that had been her mother lovingly, but the father married again, and the new wife drove Mara to dwell among the cinders (pepel), hence she was called Pepelluga, cinderwench[78]. The cruel Servian stepmother had the cow slain, but not before it had warned Mara to eat none of the kindred flesh [79], and to bury the bones in the ashes of the hearth. From these bones sprang two white doves, which supplied Mara with splendid raiment, and, finally, won for her the hand of the prince, after the usual incidents of the lost slipper, the attempt to substitute the stepmother's ugly daughter, and the warning of the fowls, 'Ki erike, the right maiden is under the trough.'
In a modern Greek variant (Hahn, ii.), the Mother (not in vaccine form) is eaten by her daughters, except the youngest, who refuses the hideous meal. The dead woman magically aids the youngest from her tomb, and the rest follows as usual, the slipper playing its accustomed part.
In Gaelic a persecuted stepdaughter is aided by a Ram. The Ram is killed, his bones are buried by his protégée, he comes to life again, but is lame, for his bones were not all collected, and he plays the part of Fairy Godmother[80].