(6) The flight of Hop o' my Thumb and his brethren is usually aided, in Zulu, Kaffir, Iroquois, Samoan, Japanese, Scotch, German, and other tales, by magical objects, which, when thrown behind the fugitives, become lakes, forests, and the like, thus detaining the pursuer. Perrault knows nothing of this. His seven-leagued boots, used by the ogre and stolen by the hero, doubtless are by the same maker as the sandals of Hermes; the goodly sandals, golden, that wax never old (Odyssey, v. 45).
In addition to these shoon, and the shoon of Loki, and the slippers of Poutraka in the Kathasaritsagara (i. 13), we may name the seven-leagued boots in the very rare old Italian rhymed Historia delliombruno, a black-letter tract, which contains one of the earliest representations of these famous articles.
While these main incidents of Hop o' my Thumb are so widely current, the general idea of a small and tricksy being is found frequently, from the Hermes of the Homeric Hymn to the Namaqua Heitsi Eibib, the other Poucet, or Tom Thumb, and the Zulu Uhlakanyana. Extraordinary precocity, even from the day of birth, distinguishes these beings (as Indra and Hermes) in myth. In Märchen it is rather their smallness and astuteness than their youth that commands admiration, though they are often very precocious. The general sense of the humour of 'infant prodigies' is perhaps the origin of these romances.
For a theory of Hop o' my Thumb, in which the forest is the night, the pebbles and crumbs the stars, the ogre the devouring Sun, the ogre's daughters 'the seven Vedic sisters,' and so forth, the curious may consult M. Hyacinthe Husson, M. André Lefèvre, or M. Frédérick Dillaye's Contes de Charles Perrault (Paris, 1880).
[93] Old Deccan Days.
[94] Theal, p. 113.
[95] The remainder of the story in the Pentamerone is entirely different. There is no ogre, and there are sea-faring adventures.
[96] Eumenides, 244.
[97] Compare L'Oiseau Vert. Cosquin, Contes de Lorraine, i. 103.
[98] Theal, p. 93.