“He laid this harp upon a stone,
And straight it began to play alone.
“ ‘O yonder sits my father, the king,
And yonder sits my mother, the queen.
“ ‘And yonder stands my brother Hugh,
And by him my William, sweet and true!’
“But the last tune that the harp played then,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
Was ‘Woe to my sister, false Helen!’
By the bonny mill-dams of Binnorie.”
“According to all complete and uncorrupted forms of the ballad,” says Professor Child, comparing not only British examples, but also a large number from Denmark, Scandinavia, Iceland and the Färoe Islands, “either some part of the body of the drowned girl is taken to furnish a musical instrument, a harp or a viol, or the instrument is wholly made from the body.” And he suggests that the original conception was the simple and beautiful one found in several variants, that the king’s harper, or the girl’s lover, takes three locks of her yellow hair to string his harp with. I venture to think he is wrong. The tradition supplied by the singer of one of the Swedish versions, though lost from the ballad itself, is much nearer the mark in relating that the drowned maiden floated ashore and grew up into a lime-tree, from whose wood the harp was made. As a matter of art it may be that, as Professor Child goes on to remark, “the restoration of the younger sister, like all good endings foisted on tragedies, emasculates the story.” But art is a slow growth, a growth of civilisation, and this tragedy is an ancient, a barbarous tale. Here the good ending has not been foisted on. It is of the very essence and primitive matter of the plot. It is not found in the more modern and cultured versions, but in the ruder and more archaic. It does not occur once in England and Scotland, where the influence of culture has been most decisive.[194.1]
Without tarrying to discuss these ballads any further, let me refer briefly to three variants of an unmistakably antiquated character collected among the Santal aborigines of Bengal. In one of them the maiden is drowned by her seven brothers’ wives. She reappears as a bamboo growing on the embankment of the tank where she had lost her life. Out of the bamboo a fiddle is made which, when played, seems to wail as in bitter anguish, and moves the hearers to tears. It is acquired by a village chief. In the absence of the household the maiden comes out of it and prepares the family meal. The chief’s son watches, discovers and marries her. A second version relates that the maiden was given by her brothers to the water-spirit to obtain water in a tank they had made. Right in the middle of the tank where she was drowned there sprang up an upel-flower, the purple sheen of which filled the beholder with delight. The bridegroom, to whom she had been betrothed previously to her sacrifice, comes to claim his bride, and gathers the flower. Ere the bridal procession reaches the bridegroom’s dwelling on its return, the flower has become the bride. The third version is more striking still. Here the heroine was eaten by a monkey. The monkey died, and from the place where his body decayed a gourd sprang and grew, and bore a fruit. A banjo was made of this gourd, which emitted wonderful music and sang the maiden’s fate. Her sister, the rani, cheated the minstrel out of the instrument and hid it in her own room. There the maiden, coming out, was discovered by the rajah, her sister’s husband; and matters were arranged more happily than in the Scottish ballad, by the two sisters’ sharing one spouse.[195.1]
In most of the cases we have dealt with, the metamorphoses undergone by the hero or heroine are, as in the Egyptian tale, stages of a contest. A curious example, where the contest is between a mbulu, or supernatural female, and a woman, is given in a Zulu tale. The mbulu was found out and put to death. From the spot where she was buried a pumpkin came up and tried to kill the child of the woman who had married the mbulu’s husband. But the people chopped the pumpkin into pieces, burned them and threw the ashes into the river, so that nothing more could come of that mbulu.[196.1] In the Russian story of The Fiend, the struggle is with a supernatural being over whose personality Christianity has thrown a deeper tint of horror. The heroine, having fallen under the Fiend’s power, dies. By her directions and her wise old grandmother’s advice, her body is not carried out through the doorway, but (according to an old custom, the object of which was to prevent the dead from finding the way back) by a hole dug under the threshold, and is buried at a crossway. A wondrous flower arises from the spot. Taken home by a young lord and placed in a flower-pot, the blossom falls at night from its stem and turns into a lovely maiden, whom of course the nobleman weds.[196.2]
The stories cited in previous chapters of the hermit burnt to death and then born anew from a girl who eats, or smells, his heart, or some other portion of his body, are unconnected with a contest. So is the Eskimo tale of the young woman who was caught by a whale. After living with him some time she fled and lived with the seals in the form of a seal. In that shape she was harpooned by a man and cut to pieces. Her head was taken home and thrown beneath the bench, whence she slipped into the womb of the man’s wife and was born anew. The name she received in this fresh birth was her old and euphonious name of Avigiatsiak.[197.1] A Tjame tale speaks of a youth who dies of hopeless love of a princess. Before his death he begs his mother, as soon as he has yielded up the ghost, to take out his liver, dry it and preserve it in a box. The king is attacked with a disease of the eyes, and is advised by his astrologers to steep the dried liver of a man in water and bathe his eyes with it. The lover’s is the only one to be procured. In bathing his eyes with the water the king observes a little babe playing in the basin. He calls his daughters to look at it; and it draws the youngest of them, the object of the dead man’s love, into the basin, where she disappears. Recourse is had again to the astrologers, who on consulting the lots discover the history of the dead lover and the cause of the princess’ disappearance. In the end, as the astrologers predict, the king’s wife bears a boy, who is no other than the lover born again, and his first mother bears a girl. When they grow up the king marries them; and on his death the boy becomes king.[197.2] Numerous Chinese tales are founded on the same superstition. In one, a man on dying contrives to avoid drinking the oblivious potion to which all the dead are condemned, and thus remembers his transformations. For his crimes he is next born as a horse, then as a puppy, afterwards as a snake, and lastly as a human being once more.[197.3] In another, the son of the Thunder-god takes a man for a trip among the clouds. In the course of his adventures he manages to steal a small star, which he brings back with him to the earth. By day it looked an ordinary, dull stone, but at night it became brilliant and lighted up the house. One evening it began to flit about like a fire-fly, and finally entered his wife’s mouth and went down her throat. That night the husband dreamed that an old friend long dead appeared to him, and said: “I am the Shao-wei star. Your friendship is still cherished by me, and now you have brought me back from the sky. Truly our destinies are knitted together, and I will repay your kindness by becoming your son.” His wife afterwards bore him a boy.[198.1]
A favourite theme in Western folk-song, a theme also known as far away as China, is that of the lovers, brought, like Tristram and Isolte, to a tragic end, from whose graves two trees grow and intertwine their branches, as if they joined in a lasting embrace. It is obvious that the trees are merely the lovers transformed. Some of the variants in ballad or märchen make this clear. Such is the ballad of Count Nello of Portugal. The hero there falls in love with the Infanta. But her father opposes the match, and cuts off the lover’s head. The Infanta then dies, and is buried before the altar, while her lover is laid near the church-porch. On the one grave sprouts a cypress, on the other an orange-tree; and their branches unite. The king orders them to be cut down. Blood flows from the cuts; and from the one tree flies forth a dove and from the other a wood-pigeon.[198.2] So in the Highland story of Deirdre the lovers are buried on either side of a loch. A fir-shoot grows out of either grave, and they unite in a knot above the loch. Twice the king orders them to be cut down, and twice they grow again. The third time they are allowed to shoot forth and unite in peace.[198.3]
But this theme is found not only in märchen and ballad. It is not less frequent in saga. In Kurdestan were shown the graves of two lovers, renowned in Kurdish story, which were, in the sixteenth century, if we may believe the native writer Ahmed Khain of Bayazid, a place of pilgrimage. On each of the graves grew a rose-tree, whose branches entwined themselves together in token, as we are told, of love.[199.1] In Germany many tales are told of white lilies growing in sign of innocence and purity out of graves. Zingerle cites, among others, the case of William of Montpellier, from whose mouth sprang a lily wherein the words Ave Maria were to be read. From the grave of Saint Andrew of Rinn in the Tirol a snow-white lily also appeared, on whose leaves, as they opened, letters were seen. It was plucked by a boy before the letters could be read; and the deed cost his family dear, for few of them there were who did not come to a violent or a premature end.[199.2] In Pomerania, a lad who learned with difficulty, and only succeeded in remembering the words “Our Father who art in heaven,” died unconfirmed. The commune would not permit his burial in consecrated earth, so he was laid outside the churchyard, close to the fence. Out of his tomb arose a beautiful white lily, bearing plainly to be read the words “Our Father who art in heaven.” On digging, it was found to be rooted in his heart. Near Wollin, on the road to Poblotz, is a spot covered with dog-roses, where, years ago, a woman was burnt as a witch and her remains buried. Before the end came to her sufferings she said: “If I be a witch, thorns will grow on my grave; if not, then roses.”[200.1] Space does not admit of our following the tale in this shape through all the countries of Europe; and it is needless. We may turn instead to note a few analogous superstitions elsewhere. Among the Kirghiz every one on whose grave a tree spontaneously grows is deemed a saint; while among the Gallas of Abyssinia wood that has been burning a little is placed upon the grave after the funeral, and if it grow it is taken as a sign that the dead man is happy.[200.2] The Santals believe that good men enter into fruit-bearing trees.[200.3] In the Molucca Islands there is a tree which bears during the night, from sunset to sunrise, a rapid succession of fragrant white flowers. To account for this phenomenon the inhabitants of Ternate have a tradition that there was once a beautiful woman who was beloved by the sun, and who, being deserted by her fickle lover, slew herself. Her body was, in accordance with the custom of the country, burnt; and from her ashes arose the tree, called by the early Portuguese voyagers the Tree of Sorrow.[200.4] The legend current among the inhabitants of Nias, an island off the coast of Sumatra, to account for the origin of the cocoa-nut-tree, relates that Halu hada, a supernatural being, one day sneezed so violently that he sneezed his head off. It fell to earth, and, being covered up, the precious tree, indispensable to man, sprang from the spot.[201.1] A German practice is manifestly a relic of a belief similar to that recorded in these tales and superstitions. If a farmer have several times a foal or calf die, he buries one of them in the garden, planting a young willow in its mouth. When the tree grows up it is never polled or lopped, but is allowed to grow its own way, and is believed to guard the farm from future casualties of the same kind.[201.2]
But though the identity of the tree with the dead man, or as in the last-cited custom with the animal, is clear in all these traditions, it is not precisely affirmed as would seem to be the case with the story of the pomegranate referred to a few pages back, or with an Arab märchen from Tunis, in which a vine grows up from the very place where the blood of a murdered man had flowed. The murderer finds one enormous bunch of grapes upon it, although the season of grapes is not yet. Struck with its beauty, as well as with the uncommon occurrence, he takes the bunch to the sultan. On opening the basket the sultan found no grapes, but a man’s head freshly cut off, dropping with blood. The murderer, horror-stricken, confessed his crime, and was summarily executed.[201.3] Thus too in Ojibway legends, reproduced by Longfellow, that mysterious being
“… the young Mondamin,
With his soft and shining tresses,
With his garments green and yellow,
With his long and glossy plumage,”
came and wrestled thrice with one of their heroes. The third time the Ojibway was victorious. His antagonist was overthrown, killed and buried. The victor watched the grave,