This class of stories, embracing nearly one-third of those represented in [Table B], is much the most interesting, not only as scattered over a far wider area than the others, but also, made up as it is partly of stories within the true Perseus cycle, and partly of stories beyond it, because several of the stories present problems of difficulty and importance. The direct derivation of the Tuscan tale already referred to from the classical legend may be assumed. In it the mirror, replacing the classical shield, is given by two old women, who are the degraded representatives of the Graiai. The same incident is found in another form in a Norwegian tale given by Asbjörnsen, where the hero steals the single eye of each of three one-eyed hags successively, and thus succeeds in wresting from them a magical sword, a magical ship, and the art, equally magical, of brewing one hundred lasts of malt in one brew. It is curious that this highly barbarous incident has not been recovered elsewhere. We cannot suppose the direct descent of the Norwegian tale from the classical, since the remaining incidents are so different. But it is, of course, possible that during the numerous Norse raids in the Middle Ages the incident may have been picked up by Wicking adventurers, and carried home from the Mediterranean shores with other spoils to Scandinavia, where it became imbedded in a native tale recognised in other respects as similar, and there replaced some equivalent incident. The conjecture cannot be rated very highly; and alternative modes of transmission will naturally present themselves to the reader. On the whole, however, transmission of the incident, not of the entire story, seems best to account for the facts.[164.1]
The only two variants of the Perseus group recovered from the East belong to this class. Somadeva’s tale of Indívarasena has already been abstracted at length.[165.1] Its divergencies from the type to which it belongs are striking—so striking that we cannot postulate transmission from Europe without conceding such alterations on the way as almost to disguise it out of all recognition. On the other hand, it is even harder to suppose that any European version can derive its origin from either the Kathá-sarit-Ságara or from the oral narrative worked up into Somadeva’s rhetorical periods. Let us examine the other Eastern variant. It is found in Cambodia, and has been published since the first volume of this inquiry was issued. Its heroes are not described as twins, though children of the same parents, and nearly of the same age. From their childhood they were, like the heroes of many Western märchen, incurably idle. To avoid being put to work, they left home together. A magician gives them two enchanted sabres, either of which will vanquish a whole army. Moreover, if one of the youths die, the sabre of the other will rust; and by means of it the dead youth can be brought back to life. These gifts they accept, though almost too lazy to carry them. They reach a city in mourning on account of the depredations of two yaks, winged monsters which have devoured already more than twenty of the king’s children, and have now demanded the last of them, his beautiful daughter, Neang (Miss) Pou. In vain the king had kindly offered them the daughter of one of his subjects in her place. They insisted on having Pou, and threatened terrible misfortunes on both the people and the king if he refused. Compelled by the prayers of his subjects, he had therefore caused poor Pou to be conducted to the house where the ogres were wont to hold their banquets of royal flesh. The brothers, passing through the city, arrived at the yaks’ house, and lay down to sleep away the heat of the day, in spite of the princess’ warnings. While they were talking to her the yaks drew nigh, and the whirr of their enormous wings resounded above the house. The princess fainted from terror, while the brothers addressed themselves to the fight, and with their enchanted weapons speedily laid the monsters low. After the fight they took the trouble to restore the princess to consciousness, but, too lazy to take her home, rambled forth again. The king, meanwhile, sent two officers to gather up her bones for burial. These men, finding the yaks dead, dipped their staves in the blood, reported to their master that they had slain the monsters, and demanded a reward. Two other mandarins were then sent to find the lady’s bones and tresses; and after some search they found her alive, and hidden in the brushwood beside the road. She refused to return to a father who had so cruelly given her up to be eaten, until he went himself mounted on the royal elephant, and forced her into the palanquin he had brought for the purpose. The king then proposed to give her in marriage to one of the mandarins who pretended to have killed the yaks; but when she told her father the facts, he sent to find the brothers, who were her true deliverers. They refused to go back with the messengers; they were too lazy; and, armed as they were, they repudiated allegiance to the king, and laughed at the threat of compulsion. However, the bodies of the yaks were unburied; they poisoned the air; and even a thousand men were unable to remove them. Nay, all the inhabitants were requisitioned, and an attempt with ten thousand proved unsuccessful in stirring one of the corpses. The brothers had not left the country, and they were incommoded by the terrible odour. Wherefore at last they offered their services, which were gladly accepted. A single touch of their sabres made a great hole in the earth, into which they pushed the yaks, and with another touch threw back the soil and covered them over. The elder brother then weds the princess, while the other sets forth on his travels again, taking the precaution, at his brother’s request, to sow along his path the seeds of a certain rare tree, to show the way he has gone. The adventurer arrives at a depopulated city, where he is attacked by a troop of gigantic birds, and overcomes them only after a fearful fight. Then he sat down to rest on a gong which he found lying in an inner court of the palace, and from a hole in which an agreeable perfume arose. He had not sat there more than an instant, when he was pricked from beneath. He jumped up and examined his seat, but could find nothing but the small hole he had noticed before. So he sat down again. Again he was pricked. He jumped up once more, and taking his sabre he clove the gong in two, when to his astonishment a lovely girl emerged, magnificently clad, and shedding around her a delicious perfume. This leads to explanations. She is called the Maiden of the Scented Locks, and is the king’s daughter. The dreadful birds he had slain had devastated the kingdom, and her father had shut her up in the gong to carry her away to a place of safety. She excused herself for pricking her deliverer because he had sat down on the hole which gave her air, and she was being stifled. The people, who had fled away, by-and-by returned—all save the maiden’s father. He had deserved the misfortunes and desolation of the country, and he returned no more. The younger brother accordingly married the Maiden of the Scented Locks, and they became king and queen. One day the queen’s favourite waiting-woman was carried away by the current of the river while bathing. She was not, however, drowned; and ultimately she was made attendant on the leprous king of a neighbouring country. From her the leper learns about her mistress of the Scented Locks. Here we have, in a rationalistic form, the incident familiar to us in the Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers. The leprous king offers to make his attendant (woman though she was) viceroy if she will only get him the Lady of the Scented Locks. The temptation was too great for her. She returned to her former mistress; and, received by her with joy, she watched her opportunity to murder the king by touching him with his own enchanted sabre. To divert the widow from her grief, she induces her to walk along the river-bank, and to board a trading junk for the purpose of looking at the silks and other merchandise it contains. But the trade was a sham; and before she knew it, the hapless queen was far away down the river, in the hands of the servants of the leprous king. All this time the elder brother was often wondering what had become of his cadet since he departed. One day he found the blade of his sabre rusted, and knew that his brother was dead. Setting out in search of him, he soon found his realm and his tomb. With his magical sabre he opened the tomb, and brought his brother back to life. Then both, disguising themselves with long beards and old garments, set out for the capital of the leprous king. Announcing themselves as able to cure leprosy, they are conducted to the monarch. The treacherous favourite has extorted a promise from the widowed Lady of the Scented Locks to yield to the desires of the king if his leprosy be cured; for leprosy is well known to be an incurable disease. By directions of the pretended physicians a house is built right in the middle of the river; and there they induce the king to put himself under a shower-bath, with which they are to mingle some drops from a bottle containing an infallible remedy. Instead of curing him, they scald him to death. They fling off their disguise, deliver the younger brother’s queen, and conquer the kingdom by means of their sabres. The treacherous favourite is not put to death, but simply banished; and the others live happy ever after.[169.1]
This tale presents more than one point of interest. Save that the brothers are two (instead of three, as in so large a number of European variants), and that the magical weapon is a sword, it bears hardly any material resemblance to Somadeva’s tale. It comprises three out of the four cardinal incidents of the cycle (though the Medusa-witch appears much modified), as well as the secondary incidents of the Gift of Weapons and the Impostor; yet without attaining any very close similarity in the manner of its telling to the European tales. To its most striking peculiarity I have already referred, namely, the incorporation of an incident found in the tale of The Two Brothers. The form of the incident in the Cambodian is obviously much later than in the Egyptian story. The comic scene of the Lady in the gong is a tolerably good guarantee that, by whatever route the incident arrived in Cambodia and became annexed to the tale, it was conveyed not by literary means, but by oral tradition. Other parts of the story betray Indian influence;[170.1] but so far as I know, the Lady of the Scented Locks has never yet been discovered in Hindustan. A near kinsman, however, appears in a märchen told by the Santals, where the hero has hair twelve cubits long. He sat down one day to dress it on the river-bank. “In combing his tangled tresses a quantity was wrenched out; this he wrapped up in a leaf and threw into the stream. It was carried by the current a great distance down to where a raja’s daughter and her companions were bathing. The raja’s daughter saw the leaf floating towards her, and ordered one of her attendants to bring it to her. When the leaf was opened it was found to contain hair twelve cubits in length. Immediately after measuring the hair the raja’s daughter complained of fever, and hasted home to her couch.” The long and short of the matter, of course, was that she had fallen in love with the unseen owner of the hair; and her father was compelled to search all over the world for him that she might marry him.[170.2] Upon this it is to be observed that the story, of which I have given only a single incident, is, as we should expect, much more savage than the Cambodian tale, and that it could not have influenced the latter. But it points to some such incident as that of the lost lock being, like the lost slipper, part of the story-plasm out of which the folk-tales of the eastern world have been evolved. The special form of the incident in M. Leclère’s tale renders probable its transmission somehow from Egypt—in the absence, that is, of any evidence of a more archaic shape from which alike the Egyptian and the Cambodian incidents with their peculiarities could have been derived. This does not necessarily involve the transmission of the entire story from Egypt, where neither in ancient nor in modern times have we found any variant from which it could have been descended. But it does smooth the way for us to accept the probability that the entire tale was transmitted from the West; and so far as it goes it is evidence against its oriental origin.
Hitherto we have not reached any very definite results in our quest. In [Tables A] and [B] I have exhibited the distribution of the stories containing either the Helpful Animals or the Magical Weapons. If these tables establish anything, it is that the greater number of the modern members of the Perseus group are independent of the classical legend. In an overwhelmingly large proportion of cases the Helpful Animals and the Magical Weapons are obtained in some other than the classical way, and usually they are congenital. In the tables account is taken not only of stories including two or more of the chief incidents, and therefore reckoned as properly members of the cycle, but also of those which only contain the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda. If we reckon the former alone, the proportion is greatly increased. The total number of cases in [Tables A] and [B] respectively will then be reduced to 65 and 39; while of these, the cases in which the Helpful Animals and the Weapons are respectively congenital will be 42 and 22, or 65 and 56 per cent. Both the Helpful Animals and the Weapons are indeed subordinate incidents in the story; but they are incidents, especially when congenital, which are important enough to influence its entire development. The stories in which horses, dogs, and lances are congenital with the heroes cannot be derived from the classical legend; and although some of the ancient variants are known to connect a fish with the demi-god, Perseus, we have no means of ascertaining whether anything corresponding to these animals and weapons was included in any of them.
The independence of the classical legend and most of the modern variants is confirmed by another test. There is no feature more marked in the modern stories than that of the Impostor and the Tokens. Of the Impostor we find a trace in antiquity, but none of the Tokens. It is true that another classical story, located at Megara, mentions both. It is preserved by the scholiast upon Apollonius Rhodius, who attributes it to Derichidas, the historian of Megara. Alkathoos, the son of Pelops, we are told, having been exiled for the murder of Chrysippe, encountered on the territory of Megara a lion which desolated the country, and which the king had commissioned some of his subjects to destroy. Alkathoos after a fight succeeded in killing the animal. Thereupon he cut out its tongue, which he placed in his wallet, and proceeded to Megara. But the men whom the king had sent against the brute claimed the honour of the victory; nor were they convicted of the imposture until Alkathoos in the king’s presence drew forth the tongue. The king offered the tongue in sacrifice to the gods, and gave his daughter Euaichme in marriage to Alkathoos, who ultimately succeeded him upon the throne.[173.1] Now it is fairly certain that this striking incident could never have been part of the ancient legend of Perseus, otherwise it would have come down to us in one or other of the classical writers. But not only is it absent from the versions of Ovid and Lucian; another account, mentioned by the mythographer Hyginus, points in a diametrically opposite direction. He calls the betrothed of Andromeda, Agenor, and declares that when Perseus wished to take Andromeda away, her father, Cepheus, and Agenor, attempted secretly to murder him, and were turned with their followers to stone by the exhibition of the Gorgon’s head.[173.2] This is more inconsistent with the modern variants than Ovid’s narrative.
So far, then, our results are the same; and it can only be claimed that the modern stories are at most (with the exception of a few variants) derived from a common stock with the classical legend. But it may be suggested that the former have been contaminated by the local tradition of Megara. The possibility of such contamination cannot be denied. An examination, however, of [Table C] fails to disclose any sure ground for believing it probable. For it will be observed that of the stories properly belonging to the cycle, upwards of fifty-two per cent. give the tongues alone as the tokens of identity; while, if we reckon the tales wherein the tongues are found, either alone or in combination with other tokens, we reach more than seventy per cent. And they are by no means confined to countries and nationalities which have come directly under classical influence, but seem to be scattered impartially over the whole of Europe. A less certain mark of contamination, but not without some value, is the character of the impostors. In the Megaran tradition they were the men whom the king had commissioned to slay the lion; therefore of the class of warriors or nobles. In stories properly belonging to the cycle less than thirty-two per cent. of the impostors come under this description, including all cases where vague description may mean any servant of the king other than menial, whereas fifty per cent. are charcoal-burners, coachmen, gipsies, and members of other despised classes. What is most remarkable is that an overwhelming proportion of the cases in which the impostors may be considered as of the class indicated in the Megaran tradition are found in lands beyond the direct classical influence. In the Balkan peninsula and the Greek islands, in Italy, Spain, and France, the all but invariable impulse of the story-teller is to degrade the impostor in rank and to render him physically, as well as morally, repellent. If all the stories, both within the Perseus group and beyond it, be taken into the calculation, the results will not be found very different. It would seem, therefore, that, to whatever cause we must ascribe the remarkable uniformity of the incident in the folk-tales of Europe, the evidence hardly warrants us in attributing it to contamination by the one local legend of Megara.[174.1]
Turning for a moment to the saga forms assumed by the Rescue incident, there is one instance wherein contamination by a local legend may have taken place, though to an altogether smaller extent. All our information points to an eastern origin for the legend of Saint George. I have already discussed the cause of the appropriation of the Rescue incident to the Christian martyr; and I need not repeat what was then said. Mr. Baring-Gould’s theory ascribes the tale to a misunderstanding of the words of a definite hagiologist. Whether we accept that theory or not, the only difference will be one of date at which the legend became current; it will not alter the geographical direction in which we must look for its origin. As preserved in some of the songs and legends of the Balkan peoples, it shows traces of being affected by the story, handed down to us by Diodorus Siculus and by Tzetzes the scholiast, of the Rescue of Hesione by Herakles. “Troyan, the white city” of the Bosnian ballad, inevitably recalls to us the Troy of Laomedon. Diodorus knew nothing of the version preserved by Tzetzes, which represents the slaughter of the monster as effected from the inside; or, if he did, he suppressed it, either as less probable or less artistic. It is clear from the story of Kleostratos recorded by Pausanias, and from the ancient vase referred to in a note on an earlier page,[175.1] that the incident of a dragon-slaughter was current in antiquity in both forms. It may be suggested that, with growth in civilisation, the fight face to face gradually superseded the ruder notion of the hero being swallowed and fighting his way forth from the serpent’s belly. Probably, therefore, the feat ascribed to Saint George in Bosnian song and Bulgarian legend is that of Herakles, rather than that of Perseus contaminated by that of Herakles. The tale of Troy was, like the story of Perseus, much more than a local legend. It was the common property of the classical world, and may well have formed part of the inheritance of all the Balkan nations. The intrusive barbarians who settled from time to time during the decadence of the empire about the Danube and the Balkans, must also have had their legends of dragon-slaying, whose essential identity with those of the original population would be recognised. The confusion thus caused would render it all the easier to substitute a new hero consecrated by religion, and consequently having claims upon belief which the older heroes had ceased to wield. Yet the previous details would not be all effaced; and in such as were preserved we should find evidence of the double procession. Thus the interference of “the thundering Elijah” bears witness to Slavonic influences, for Elijah as a saint is but a Christian disguise of the pagan Slavonic thunder-god. In the same way the name of Troyan enables us to say which of the classical Rescue legends it is that has been worked up, with the Slavonic tradition, into the ballad of Saint George. The names and special details connected with the feat of Perseus are conspicuously absent.
We need not, however, conclude that everywhere the legends and songs concerning Saint George embodied the saga of Hermione rather than that of Andromeda. The generally accepted ecclesiastical version laid the scene of the conflict at a town of Libya, which would assuredly point to the latter; while the local traditions whereof the martial saint is hero indicate anything but descent from a story told of so famous a city as Troy. Nor must we leave out of view the probability that in antiquity, as in modern times, beside the sagas fitted with names of heroes and of places, there was current a variety of märchen, similar in plot, and to some extent in detail, ready to be adapted to any names which might happen to lay hold of the popular fancy. Such might easily infect the legend of Saint George while it was taking shape among the folk, and as yet no version had acquired preponderant authority, and thus form variants either of local, or, if fortune smiled upon them, of more than local, acceptance.
But this christianised saga was not quite the only form of the Rescue story known during the Middle Ages. Cuchulainn’s fight with the Fomori was told as early as the legend of Saint George, if not indeed earlier. I have already noted its remarkable resemblance to the corresponding incident in märchen of the Herdsman type—a highly specialised type, differing considerably from any form of the classical story, and peculiar to the west of Europe. We have no direct evidence as to the date when the stories of the Herdsman type arose; but it will be recollected that there is reason to think the type belongs to the Celto-Iberian race, and therefore is of prehistoric age. Nor will the reader fail to note that the Rescue of Devorgoil from the Fomori appears to be an offshoot of the same type, that it is found among one of the branches of the same Celto-Iberian race, and that it is one of the oldest—nay, perhaps, the oldest—post-classical variant in Europe of the Perseus group. All these considerations make for its independence of the classical tale; and their cumulative weight may fairly be called decisive.
It has been contended, and it may be thought, that we should look for evidence of transmission rather to the general identity and sequence of the main incidents than to the recurrence of trivial details. An able and well-known writer, criticising M. Bédier’s use of special accessories as a test of transmission, has lately traversed its validity as applied to folklore. “It is obviously derived,” he says, “from considerations current in literary criticism, as might be expected from M. Bédier’s training. His method is exactly the process by which literary critics prove the derivation of one species of mss. from an archetype, or affiliate a translation in one language to its original in another. Minute and unimportant accessories, e.g. the form of a proper name, are just the tests in such cases. But with oral tradition, with transmission in folklore, I would exactly reverse the process and adopt M. Bédier’s test”—namely, similarity in the general idea—“as a proof of such transmission.”[178.1]