The population of Eastern Pomerania is probably in the main Slavonic. There the people tell of a queen to whom a beggar-woman brought two fishes to be eaten by herself; nobody else was to taste them. The cat, however, stole one; and she and the queen bore a son apiece.[74.3] Outside the Slavonic populations, the incident in this form does not seem a favourite in Europe. But we find in Iceland a story of an earl’s wife, to whom three women in blue mantles appear in a dream, and command her to go to a stream at hand, and, laying herself down, to drink of it and try to get into her mouth a certain trout she will see there, when she will at once conceive. These women are doubtless Norns, for they appear again at the birth and pronounce the fate of the daughter who is born to the lady in consequence.[75.1]
Among the Eskimo it is also a woman who provides the fish. She meets the husband, and from her bag produces two small dried fishes, a male and a female. His wife is to eat the former if a son be desired, the latter if a daughter. As he does not want a daughter, he himself eats the female fish, with the wholly unexpected result that he himself gives birth to the daughter.[75.2]
Two curious tales are recorded from Annam. One of them, thought by M. Landes, who collected it, to be of Chinese provenience, speaks of a childless man who determined to eat an enormous eel known to inhabit a certain river-confluence. To him a bonze comes and begs him to spare it. When he cannot prevail, the holy man asks for food ere he retires. He is given the usual vegetables, cooked according to Buddhist ritual for this purpose without salt or seasoning, and then goes away. The other man catches the eel by poisoning the water; and when it is cooked the food offered to the bonze is found in its stomach: hence it is known that the bonze was no other than a manifestation of the eel. After the man has eaten the eel, his wife becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son, who ultimately proves the ruin of his parents. In short, he is no other than the eel, who thus avenges itself on its murderer.[75.3] Here we find expressly asserted the identity of the progeny with the mysterious fish, a subject whereto I shall have to return in a future chapter. The other Annamite story is a variant of the well-known group of The Lucky Fool. A lazy man was once lying on a raft when a fish leaped upon it. The man caught the fish, scraped off its scales; and, being too slothful to rise and wash it in the water, he rinsed it in his own urine, and threw it on the raft to dry. It is, however, carried off by a raven into the king’s daughter’s garden. Her maids bring it to her; and when it is cooked she eats it, and immediately becomes pregnant. In due time she gives birth to a son; and the king summons all the men of his kingdom that he may choose a husband for her. The lazy man floats his raft to the front of the palace. The princess’ son sees him from the palace-roof, and hails him as his father. Believing in this wise child, the king sends for the lazy man to his presence, and gives him the princess in marriage.[76.1] Such was the reward of laziness.
In India the ordinary mode of supernatural conception is by the eating of fruit. A few examples will suffice. I have in a previous chapter related Somadeva’s tale of Indívarasena and his brother, who were born in consequence of their mother’s eating two heavenly fruits. The Kathá-sarit-Ságara, or Ocean of the Streams of Story, contains other narratives to the same effect. Concerning the birth of the famous hero Vikramáditya, it tells us that Siva appeared to his mother in a dream and gave her a fruit.[76.2] Another childless queen, after propitiating Siva, receives a fruit in a dream from “a certain man with matted locks,” no doubt a fakir.[76.3] In modern folklore Siva appears in the garb of a jogí, or fakir, to a childless king and hands him four fruits, which the queen is to eat the following Sunday before sunrise, and she will then bear four sons, who will be exceedingly clever and good.[77.1] Elsewhere we are told of a rajah, who has seven wives, but no offspring. He is given by a fakir a stick, with instructions to knock down seven mangoes from a certain tree and, catching them as they fall, to take them home to his seven wives. Six of the wives eat the seven mangoes; and the seventh wife is reduced to eating one of the mango-stones thrown away by the other wives. All seven give birth to sons; but the son of the seventh is born in monkey-form. He is, of course, the hero, his brothers playing the same part towards him as those of Joseph, or those of Khodadad in the Arabian Nights.[77.2] A barren woman in another tale goes to Mahadeo, or Siva. He meets with her in his customary disguise as a fakir, and gives her a mango, whereof she and two other women, who desire the same boon but have been deterred from reaching the god by the dangers of the way, are to eat. She is blessed with a son, and the other women with a daughter each.[77.3] Mangoes, indeed, seem the usual prescription in Indian folktales.
Other fruits are not wanting. A fakir gives to a monarch who is without issue one hundred and sixty lichí fruits, which resemble plums—one for each of his wives.[77.4] Barleycorns are given by another holy man for the same pious purpose.[77.5] The Adventures of Kâmrûp, a literary romance in Hindustani, tells of a king who had no children. He is presented by a fakir with a fruit of srî, or prosperity. It is eaten by his queen; and she and six other ladies who taste it add to the population on the same day.[78.1] The youngest of seven brothers, in a Santali story, plants a certain vegetable which bears a fruit. He measures its growth daily, until it becomes a span long and then remains stationary. He warns his sisters-in-law: “Do not eat my fruit, for whoever does so will give birth to a child only one span long.” The temptation is too great for one of them. She plucks the fruit and eats it; and though she, in common with the other sisters-in-law, positively denies the theft, she is found out in due time by the advent of a baby one span long—a Santali Tom Thumb.[78.2]
According to a tale of the Altaic tribes of South Siberia, a girl when married is found to be already pregnant. On being questioned, her account of the matter was that she had picked up a lump of ice which had fallen with a heavy rain, and on breaking it in pieces she had found inside, and eaten, two grains of wheat. When her time came she bore twin boys.[78.3] A curious legend obtained by Professor Haddon from an islander of Torres Straits declares that a woman, who had been deprived of her husband by a supernatural female and set adrift on the sea, was cast away on an island where she had no other food than some seeds which ornamented her ear-pendants. After consuming them she discovered that she was in the way to become a mother, and laid an egg, like a sea-eagle’s, out of which she hatched a bird. The bird supported her, and at length brought her back to her husband.[78.4]
Mohammedan stories attach, as we might expect, inordinate value to the male sex. They represent the fruit as eaten by the father, rather than by the mother. The Qissa Agar o Gul is an Urdu adaptation of a Persian romance. It was published as lately as 1880 at Lucknow. Here the fruit, a couple of apples, is given by a dervish to a king and his vizier, neither of whom has issue. Each of them eats his apple, and begets—the king, a son, and the vizier, twins, boy and girl.[79.1] I have already referred incidentally to the case of Khodadad, who was one of fifty brethren begotten by a childless monarch upon his fifty wives, after eating as many pomegranate seeds. He had incessantly prayed for offspring, and was commanded in a dream by a man “of semblance like unto a prophet” to rise at dawn, and, saying certain prayers, to go to his Chief Gardener, from whom he was to require a pomegranate and to take of it as many seeds as seemed best to him.[79.2] Another sultan is represented in the same great collection as receiving from a Takrúri, one of a Moslem negroid people credited by the Arabs with magical powers, a portion of certain medicinal roots, to be eaten by himself.[79.3] So in the Turkish History of Forty Vezirs, where a childless king beseeches the intercession of a convent of dervishes, and sends them a fat ram and an offering of rice, honey and oil, the sheykh of the convent returns him a bowlful “of that meat,” ordering him to “desire a son and eat of the dervishes’ portion.”[79.4] Yet the rule is not without exception. A sovereign of Serendib, in the Bahar Danush, receives from a religious recluse an apple with instructions to give it to his consort.[80.1] A tale told by the Kabyles of the Lower Atlas speaks of a man who bought seven apples for his seven wives. Growing hungry, he ate half of one, or, according to a variant, he gave it to a man who met him. The result was that the wife who had only the other half brought forth a dwarf.[80.2] And in a Balochi tale a fakir gives a king two kunar-fruits (Zizyphus Jujuba), one to be eaten by himself and the other by his wife.[80.3] These exceptions, however, are more apparent than real. The Bahar Danush is an Indian work, composed in the reign of Shah Jehan by Ināyatu ’llāh of Delhi, who professed to have received the stories of which it is composed from a Brahman. This is merely another way of saying that they are drawn from earlier Indian sources. The Kabyles are mountain tribes related to the Berbers. The religion of the Apostle of Allah sits lightly upon them. Their aboriginal precepts are at least as much regarded as those of the Koran; and so far are their social relations from being dominated by Arab customs, that their women enjoy free and unrestricted intercourse with both sexes, and are looked upon as almost if not quite the equals of men. The Balochis pay little more respect than the Kabyles to Islam; and their religious practices are largely tinged with their ancestral paganism and that of their neighbours.
When a European folktale, on the other hand, exhibits the husband as devouring the magical fruit meant for his wife, it does not fail to make him repent it. For example, in a Portuguese tale from Algarve, a woman who confesses to Saint Antony, and confides to him her despair of children, receives from the saint three apples to be eaten fasting. Arrived at home, she puts the apples down and prepares breakfast. Her husband, meanwhile, coming in, finds and eats them. When he learned what he had done he was terrified, and sent his wife back to the holy man, only to have his terrors confirmed. As the time arrived he began to scream; nor had he any alleviation of his agony until a person who understood came and cut him open, and brought forth a daughter.[81.1] But in cases where both parents partake of the fruit, the natural way of birth is the result. An old woman in an Abruzzian tale gives a fisherman’s wife an orange, to be eaten, half by herself and the other half by her husband. The rind is to be thrown at the foot of an orange-tree in the garden. A boy is born, and a sword grows at the foot of the orange-tree.[81.2] A Greek tradition belonging to the Bluebeard cycle relates that an ogre divided an apple between a king and his wife, on condition that the eldest son was to be given to him. The queen thereafter bears three boys. This is from the island of Syra. A story from Ziza in Epirus speaks of two spouses who had lived with one another for forty years without issue, and who obtained a boy under similar conditions; and a mare to which they give the apple-parings bore a foal.[81.3] On the whole we are probably warranted in conjecturing that Mohammedanism has influenced all the stories where the husband consumes the fruit without evil results; and that they are a departure from the earlier form, in which the wife eats it alone. A variant of the last-mentioned märchen, also from Epirus, follows the usual rule. There a queen was presented with an apple by a Jew. She ate it and threw the peel away, and the mare devoured it. By and by the queen and the mare were both found pregnant.[82.1] Beyond the Ægean Sea the Hellenic population has preserved the same version of the incident in a tale from Smyrna of a queen on whom a dervish confers three apples, with directions to eat them and she will have three boys.[82.2] So, in a French tale from Louisiana, a lady is given an apple by an old woman. She eats the apple and throws the peel in the yard, where it is eaten by a mare. The next morning, so rapid is the effect of magical power, both she and the mare have brought forth young.[82.3]
The Russians have the story in a shape recalling some of the variants of the Danae type. A Tsaritsa, to quench her thirst, draws water from a white marble well in a golden cup. She drinks eagerly, and with the water swallows a pea, thus becoming pregnant of a son who is destined to achieve the destruction of the Savage Serpent.[82.4] In White Russia we hear of a woman who, having drawn water, is returning with her bucket when she sees a pea rolling along. Saying to herself, “This is the gift of God,” she picks it up, eats it, and in course of time becomes the mother of a tiny boy, “who grew not by years, but by hours, like millet-dough when leavened,” and became a hero of enormous strength and wisdom, called Little Rolling-pea.[83.1]
The consumption of some kind of drug, or enchanted compound, is also an approved method of causing pregnancy, especially (if we may judge by the proportion of tales wherein it appears) in India. In the Bengali tale of Life’s Secret a fakir offers a drug to a childless queen, to remove her barrenness, telling her that if she swallow it with the juice of a pomegranate flower a son will be born, whose life shall be bound up in a golden necklace, in a wooden box, in the heart of a big boal-fish, in the tank in front of the palace.[83.2] A Buddhist tale, originally from India, has been found, containing the incident, in Ceylon, and also in the Kah-gyur, a Tibetan version of an Indian collection no longer extant. It narrates how Indra, the king of the gods, taking pity on his friend, King Sakuni, sends him a medicine, of which his wives are to drink, and he will thereby obtain sons and daughters.[83.3] Often a bargain is made, as in some of the European tales already cited, that the queen shall bear twins, one of whom is to be given to the holy man, or supernatural being, through whose gift the curse of barrenness has been taken away. So in another Bengali tale a religious mendicant came to a king who had no issue, and said: “As you are anxious to have a son, I can give the queen a drug, by swallowing which she will give birth to twin sons; but I will give the medicine on this condition, that of those twins you will give one to me and keep the other yourself.”[84.1] And the same bargain is made by a jogi in a folktale from the Kamaon in the Himalaya, in giving a fruit, which, divided between a king’s seven wives, causes them to bear a son apiece.[84.2] Nor is the bargain confined to India. In a tale told by the Swahili, or mongrel inhabitants, half Negro half Arab, of Zanzibar, a demon came disguised as a man to a sultan who lacked a son, and asked: “If I give you a medicine, and you get a son, what will you give me?” The sultan offers half his property; but it is rejected. He then offers half his towns. The demon replies: “I am not satisfied.” The sultan inquires: “What do you want, then?” And he said: “If you get two children, give me one, and take one yourself.” The sultan said: “I have consented.” The demon accordingly brings him a medicine, which his wife takes and bears three sons.[84.3]