The islanders of Sardinia have a Saint George of their own, who was bishop of Suelli. In the commune of Sant’ Andrea Frius, a village in the province of Cagliari, is a tract called “the Plain of Blood,” where grew a reddish plant, said to have been tinged by the blood of the dragon, whom this very saint slew there.[47.1] This is an instance in which coincidence of name has been the cause of confusion.
Outside the legends of the saints, the deliverance of a maiden is, with one exception, hardly found in modern Europe. Tales of the conquest of a dragon or other monster are common enough, both in this island and on the Continent; but since there is no lady in the case it is needless to refer here more particularly to any save the remarkable story of the Pollard Worm. The tradition is that long ago a huge and savage wild boar—not a serpent—infested the woods of Bishop Auckland, and every effort to destroy it failed, the adventurers who had undertaken the achievement having all perished in the attempt. At length both the king and the prince-bishop of Durham, whose favourite residence was at Auckland Castle, offered rewards for its destruction. A member of the Pollard family, already an honourable and ancient one, rode forth in search of the monster, and after a desperate struggle succeeded in severing its head from the trunk. Having done this he cut out the tongue, which he placed in his wallet, and then, overcome with weariness (for he seems to have fought during the night), he stretched himself on the ground and fell fast asleep. Now the terms of the king’s proclamation were such that the reward was due to any one who would bring him the boar’s head to his palace at Westminster. While the victor slept, the lord of Mitford Castle, near Morpeth, rode by on his way to London, and seeing the slaughtered boar and the sleeping man, he could not be in any doubt as to what had happened. So he played the charcoal-burner’s part, and stealthily dismounting took up the head, slung it at his saddle-bow, leapt again upon his steed, and made all haste to London, where he showed the head and won the reward. When Pollard awoke, to his dismay the head had disappeared. However, he made the best of his way to Auckland Castle, where he arrived at an unseasonable moment, for the bishop was just sitting down to dinner. When the message was brought to his lordship, he “sent the champion word that he might take for his guerdon as much land as he could ride round during the hour of dinner. Weary as he was, Pollard had all his wits about him. He turned his horse’s head and rode round Auckland Castle, thus making it, and all it contained, his own. The bishop could not but acknowledge his claim, and gladly redeemed castle, goods, and chattels on the best terms he could. He granted the champion a freehold estate, still known as Pollard’s Lands, with this condition annexed: the possessor was to meet every bishop of Durham on his first coming to Auckland Castle, and to present him with a falchion, saying, ‘My lord, I, on behalf of myself, as well as several others, possessors of Pollard’s lands, do humbly present your lordship with this falchion at your first coming here, wherewith as the tradition goeth he slew of old a mighty boar which did much harm to man and beast, and by performing this service we hold our lands.’ It may be added that the crest of the Pollard family is an arm holding a falchion.” Pollard’s next business was to go to London and urge his claims there. He pleaded that the head Mitford had brought was without a tongue, but to no purpose. Mitford had fulfilled the terms of the royal proclamation, and to Mitford the reward had already been given.[49.1]
Before leaving the subject of European sagas one important Rescue story must, however, be mentioned. It forms part of the Irish tale of The Wooing of Emer, and is to this effect: Cuchulainn, coming to the house of Ruad, king of the Isles, on Samuin night (Hallowe’en), hears wailing in the dun of the king. Inquiring the cause of the lamentations, he is told that Devorgoil, the king’s daughter, has been taken as tribute to the Fomori, a monster race dwelling beneath the sea, and she is exposed on the sea-shore that they may fetch her. He goes down to the strand and there finds the maiden. “He asked tidings of her. The maiden told him fully. ‘Whence do the men come?’ said he. ‘From that distant island yonder,’ said she; ‘be not here in sight of the robbers.’ He remained there awaiting them and killed the three Fomori in single combat. But the last man wounded him at the wrist. The maiden gave him a strip from her garment round his wound. He then went away without making himself known to the maiden. The maiden came to the dun and told her father the whole story.… Many in the dun boasted of having killed the Fomori, but the maiden did not believe them.” So the king prepared a bath, to which every one was brought separately. Cuchulainn came, like everybody else, and the maiden recognised him—doubtless by the strip of her garment on his wound. The king offered him the damsel to wife, but he said: “Not so. Let her come this day year to Erinn after me, if it be pleasant to her, and she will find me there.” “He ought of course to have married her,” as Mr. Nutt, commenting on the story, remarks; “but this would have conflicted with the purpose of the tale… which is to celebrate the heroic loves of Cuchullainn and Emer.” So the marriage is prevented by a device mentioned in one of our earlier chapters. Devorgoil came with her handmaid in bird-form, and Cuchulainn, not recognising her, struck her with a stone from his sling, which he afterwards sucked from the wound, thereby becoming her blood-brother.[50.1] Here it is plain, as has been noted by both Professor Rhys and Mr. Nutt, that we have a variant of the incident under consideration. The manuscript containing the story was compiled in A.D. 1300; and there are reasons for thinking that in its present form the story is at least as old as the early part of the eleventh century. It is probable that the incident is “a folktale arbitrarily altered in order to be introduced into the” saga of Cuchulainn. This at least is Mr. Nutt’s acute conjecture; and I scarcely know how else to account for the resemblance the incident bears to that found in stories of the Herdsman type. The Herdsman type, as we have seen, appears to have originated among the Celts, or rather perhaps among that Iberian race which overspread in far prehistoric times the whole of the west of Europe, and after the Celtic conquest of these islands formed the substratum of the population. We shall hereafter see the bearing of this fact on the question of origin. Meanwhile, we may turn to other variants.
The tale of the Rescue of Andromeda is known to the farthest limits of Asia. Mr. J. F. Campbell describes a picture he saw in a temple at Shimonoshua in Japan. “A man with long black hair and a hooked nose, and a long straight sword, loose red trousers, a flowered white cloak, and curled-up shoes, like those of the Mikado and Laplanders. Eight round China vases, breaking waves and the sea; a weird tree, and a storm of wind and rain driving at the man; eight heads, like the head of the dragon of the fountain [previously described]. A woman crouched in a cago, behind the warrior, dressed in Japanese draperies; a great deal of unpainted wood to make the background of this curious old sketch by a very clever hand; a lot of Japanese writing, and a black frame which had remnants of gilding. That was the picture. The whole was much weathered and battered and in a bad light. It is at least three hundred years old.”[51.1] Mr. Campbell was not the man to look at such a picture without having his curiosity aroused to know its meaning; and he learned from Massanao, his youthful squire at Shimonoshua, a story substantially identical with the account I follow derived from a different source. Susa No, the tricksy son of Isanagi, the Japanese Creator, being forbidden to return to heaven after his exploits there, and reluctant to turn his steps to the Underworld, which he had of his own free choice inherited as his abode, wandered through the earth. From Corea he crossed the strait and landed at Idzumo in Japan. As he trod the shore eager to know who dwelt in that strange country he heard the sound of weeping and wailing. Passing onwards in the direction of the sound, he beheld in a little glen an old man and woman, and between them was seated a lovely maiden whose bitter sighing and tears they were striving in vain to still. Susa No quickened his steps towards the group, and gently inquired the reason of this grief. “I am Ashinadzutchi, the god of this country,” said the old man, rising and bowing low before the stranger. “Peacefully I and mine tend the cultivation of rice; and there were nothing left for us to wish if only we were freed from one frightful, indescribably cruel calamity. Seven daughters have already been devoured by a hideous sea-monster. The creature came hither when my daughters were in the very flower of their beauty. It was incapable of compassion; it regarded not their screams of agony, but devoured them. This is the last of our daughters, our beautiful and good Inada; and of her too the monster will rob us; we know it only too well; and that is why we are mourning and weeping with our dear child.” The astounded Susa No inquired more particularly about the monster, and learned that it was a terrible dragon with eight heads, whose glowing eyes shone afar and were red as red berries. Its back was overgrown with downright forests; its belly was blood-red, and continually bedabbled in blood; its whole coiling length was as long as some winding valley. Undaunted, however, he promised help against the oppressor; only he prayed the old man and his wife to give him the fair Inada to wife if he succeeded in rescuing her from the dragon’s maw. His measures were soon taken. He requested Ashinadzutchi to prepare a great quantity of saki. He himself the while built eight small rooms or enclosures, open above; and in each room he put a large vat of saki. When the monster drew nigh he threw a woman’s robe around him and placed himself so that his reflection fell into the first vat. The hungry dragon, seeing it, plunged its first head into the vat, deeming that its prey was there. With headlong speed it drained the saki to reach the maiden, but found her not. Her image was shimmering and beckoning from the second vat; and rashly and greedily it plunged another head into that. In vain it emptied the second vat; in vain it pursued the same false image into the depths of the remaining vats one after the other. By the time the eight vats were emptied the monster rolled over on the earth in a drunken sleep. Then Susa No stepped forward, flung off his disguise, drew his sword, smote off the heads of the ungainly brute, and hewed his mighty body into small pieces. But when he came to the tail his good sword was notched and blunted with the blows. Then he discovered in the dragon’s tail a sword even better than his own. He took the prize, called it Cloud-sword, because the dragon was ever girt with dense clouds, and sent it as a gift to his sister Amaterasu, the sun-goddess, up yonder in heaven. She held it ever in high esteem, and in after-days gave it to her grandson, the ancestor of the Mikado. By him it was bequeathed to his descendants, and it is still, if report lie not, among the most precious treasures of the imperial crown. Inada was not unwilling to be bestowed upon a wooer who had won her so nobly. They dwelt long and happily together in Idzumo, and became the parents of a race of heroes and rulers renowned in story. And Susa No made upon his conquest of the dragon and his marriage the oldest poem in the Japanese tongue, whence he is honoured as the inventor of the art of poetry.[53.1]
I may pause here to observe that the device of rendering the dragon torpid by gorging it is not unknown in Western tales. To give a single example, it shall be one that Sir Robert Atkyns turns aside from his dreary genealogies and heraldic studies to mention, because the hero was the traditional founder of one of those innumerable county families whose exciting chronicle of births, marriages, and deaths is of such vast importance to the local historian, and of none whatever to the rest of the world. The story is that the neighbourhood of Deerhurst, in Gloucestershire, was plagued by “a serpent of prodigious bigness,” which poisoned the inhabitants and slew their cattle. The people petitioned the king; and a proclamation was issued in response, offering an estate, then belonging to the Crown, on Walton Hill in the parish of Deerhurst to any one who should kill the serpent. This was accomplished by one John Smith, “a labourer.” He put a quantity of milk in a place frequented by the monster; and the brute, having swallowed the whole, “lay down in the sun with his scales ruffled up. Seeing him in this situation, Smith advanced, and striking between the scales with his axe, took off his head. The family of the Smiths enjoyed the estate when Sir Robert compiled this account, and Mr. Lane, who married a widow of that family, had then the axe in his possession.”[54.1] Here for saki we have milk; and the Mikado’s sword is replaced by Mr. Lane’s axe. The church at Deerhurst is one of the most ancient in the country. Its tower in particular is of singular interest; and it has been assigned to a date as early as the eighth century. Beyond doubt it witnessed the Norman Conquest, and was probably by no means a new building then. Immediately over the door projects a broken stone, roughly carved into the shape of a dragon’s head; and above a window higher up is a second stone of a similar form. It is quite likely that, as in the case of the statue at Mansfeld, so here, the carving on the church has caused the localisation of the legend.[55.1]
These examples stand by no means alone. The carving at Brent Pelham, referred to in a note on a previous page, appears to be the origin of a similar story. In the church of Mordiford, in Herefordshire, is a painting representing a winged serpent about twelve feet long, with a large head and open mouth. The tradition is that a dragon infested the neighbourhood, and a condemned malefactor was promised pardon if he would destroy the creature. He fought and killed it in the river Lug, but fell a victim to the poison of its breath. Here again the representation probably suggested the tradition as a special appurtenance of the village; and among others of which we may suspect the same are the famous worms of Lambton in Durham, and Linton in Roxburghshire.[56.1] The dragon held a prominent place in the mythology of the northern nations, as it has done in many others, and was a favourite subject of both Teutonic and Celtic Art. To trace its somewhat complex artistic history is foreign to my purpose; but the briefest notice of local traditions could hardly be considered complete without some mention of the influence of sculptures and pictures whose meaning had been lost.
We may now return to sagas more properly coming within our ken. From Candahar is reported a Mussulman legend, which relates that in pagan times the king of Candahar found himself compelled to promise a young girl every day to a dragon. Accordingly a maiden mounted on a camel was daily sent to the monster. As soon as the camel arrived within a certain distance of the cavern where the dragon dwelt, the latter inhaled its breath with such force that its prey was inevitably drawn into its throat. One day the lot fell on the fairest maid of Candahar, when Ali, “the sword of the faith,” happened to pass through the country, and saw the victim in tears. Learning the cause of her distress, he placed himself in her stead on the camel, and at the moment of being drawn into the monster’s throat he cut off its head with his irresistible blade.[56.2] In Abyssinia the tale is told with variations, due to Christian and Jewish influences. Axum, we learn, was the seat of a serpent-king, for whose appetite a virgin was daily provided. When it came to the turn of Saba, a virgin of high birth and pure spirit, she was rescued by a “celestial warrior in earthly form,” but not before the serpent’s saliva had fallen on her foot, causing her thereafter incurable ulcers and lameness. She was acclaimed queen; but her disease marred her joy. Wherefore she crossed the seas to seek for healing at the hands of the renowned King Solomon, from whom she obtained not only restoration to health but also a son, born after her return to Abyssinia. He was named Menelek, and to him the kings of Gondar have ever since traced their ancestry.[57.1] In the basin of the Upper Niger, the story concerns not the beginnings of a royal race but the destruction of a kingdom—that of the Bakiris whose capital was called Wagadu. It was said to be colossally rich; the kings possessed an immense treasure; but they owed their fortune to the protection of a serpent which dwelt within a well near the king’s village. Every year, by lot, one of the loveliest maidens of the country was chosen, and, arrayed like a bride, she was conducted to the well, when the serpent would come forth and, rolling his scaly folds around her, would carry her off to his den. Now, one year the lot fell on a damsel betrothed to the bravest warrior of the land, who, besides, was the king’s cousin. He swore to save her, and mounted on his steed, which he had tethered near the well, he awaited the dragon’s coming. Twice the serpent put forth his head, and twice drew back. But the third time, the moment he stretched out to seize the prey the warrior lunged forward, cut the brute in two with a single blow of his sabre; and seizing his beloved he carried her off with all the speed of his courser, which no horse has ever surpassed. As he disappeared, a voice was heard from the well denouncing seven years of drought and every evil a country could suffer. The king sought his cousin and would have put him to death; but he could not be caught. Soon the predicted woes were accomplished; and forced by drought and sickness the population deserted the capital in a body for other lands. It is even said that the king, unable to carry off his riches, buried them, and that no man since has been able to find them, for the soil burns and bursts into flame beneath the hardy treasure-seeker. Certain it is that scourges of various kinds, which transformed the country into desert, caused the emigration of a once numerous people.[58.1]
Variants in east and west represent the maiden as her own deliverer. In the Golden Legend of à Voragine we read that Saint Margaret was flung into a dungeon, after tortures of the kind that churchmen, with equal piety and delight, ascribed to their martyrs and inflicted on their opponents. In her cell she prayed to the Lord that the Enemy with whom she was fighting might appear to her in visible form. A huge dragon instantly assailed and attempted to devour her; but she made the sign of the cross, and it vanished. It is elsewhere stated, we are told, that the dragon had actually got her into its mouth and was about to swallow her, when she fortified herself with the sign of the cross: the dragon forthwith burst asunder and the virgin came forth unharmed. Here, however, the pious author becomes critical. It was not incredible that the Devil should come in the shape of a dragon and should seek to devour her, nor that she should repulse him unaided save by the sign of the cross. But that he should have got her between his jaws, and that he should have burst asunder, was apocryphal and frivolous.[59.1] Obviously it would never have done to let people believe that the Devil had come to an end in this way: it would be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
In Germany the maiden’s victory is localised on the far-famed Drachenfels. While Rome was yet mistress of the left bank of the Rhine, and Christianity under her power had established itself there, the heathen hordes on the right bank continued to assert their independence, and made constant raids on the opposite side. On one of these freebooting excursions they captured a Christian king’s daughter. The son of the ruler of the Löwenburg fell in love with her, and would have wedded her had she not refused to give her hand to a worshipper of false gods. Whereupon it was decreed in a council of the chiefs that the damsel should be offered up to a ferocious dragon dwelling in a cave on that one of the Seven Mountains whose steep top looked down into the green waves of the surging Rhine. Early on the morrow, while the dragon yet slept, she was accordingly dragged up the rock and fettered to a tree near the cavern. At the foot of the mountain gathered an expectant crowd—among them her heathen lover, who longed to hasten up and shield the maiden’s life with his own; but she was condemned to death by the nobles, and he durst not interfere. Meanwhile she stood unterrified; and as she quietly awaited the dragon, she drew from her bosom a crucifix and fixed her trustful gaze upon it. Out came the monster from his hole, and, catching sight of the sacrifice provided for him, he rushed upon her. The crucifix, however, proved too much for him. When he beheld it in her hands terror and stupefaction seized him; he fell down in the most natural way and rolled from the precipitous cliff right into the foaming flood below, there to find a watery grave. Nothing more of course was wanted to convert the heathen; and the legend winds up, in a manner somewhat more idyllic than orthodox, with the wedding of the pious maiden to the king’s son after he had received “the bath of regeneration.”[60.1] The story has clearly been provided with a religious and literary gloss; but there is no reason why in substance it may not be of traditional origin, and the conclusion indicates a strong probability that as originally told it was the king’s son who effected the maiden’s deliverance. The Kwang-po-wu-chih, a compilation of the end of the sixteenth century, furnishes a Chinese version also literary in appearance, the popular provenience of which cannot be doubted. “In the eastern regions of Yueh Min (the present Fuhkien) there exists a range of mountains called the Yung Ling, many tens of li in height, in the north-western recesses of which there abode a mighty serpent, seven or eight chang (seventy or eighty feet) in length and ten feet in circumference, which was held in great awe by the people of the country. At a certain time it signified, either to some person in a dream or to those versed in the art of divination, that it lusted to devour a maiden of the age of twelve or thirteen; and the governors and men in authority of that region, equally alarmed respecting the monster, sought out female bond-servants and the daughters of criminals to satisfy the serpent’s appetite. In the morning of the day in the eighth moon, after offering sacrifices, the victim was taken to the mouth of the serpent’s cavern, and at night the serpent suddenly issued forth and devoured its prey. Year after year this happened, until at length nine maidens in all had been offered up; and a fresh demand was being made but no victim could be obtained. At this time Li Tan, Magistrate of Tsing Lo, had six daughters and no sons. His youngest daughter, named Ki, responded to the call and was ready to proceed (to the cavern), but her parents refused consent. She urged, however, that she was unable to be of use to her parents, as was Ti Ying (the faithful daughter of olden times), and being a mere source of useless expense might as well bring her life to a speedy close, and only requested to be supplied with a good sword and a dog that would bite at snakes. In the morning of the day of the eighth month she visited the Temple with the sword beside her and the dog provided. She had also previously prepared several measures of boiled rice mixed with honey, which she placed at the mouth of the cavern. At night the serpent came forth, its head as large as a rice stock and its eyes like mirrors two feet across—when, perceiving the aroma of the mess of rice, it began to devour it. Ki forthwith let loose her dog which seized the serpent in its teeth, and the maiden hereupon hacked the monster from behind, so that after dragging itself to the mouth of its cave it died. The maiden entered the cavern and recovered the skeletons of the nine previous victims, whose untimely fate she bewailed. After this she leisurely returned home, and the Prince of Sueh, hearing of her exploit, raised her to be his Queen.”[62.1]
In the last chapter I summarised several märchen wherein Andromeda was replaced by a youth of the opposite sex. Such examples are rare among sagas. Beside the cases of Kleostratos and Theseus already cited I am only aware of one other, which indeed appears to be merely one of the märchen from the Panjáb with its hero identified as the celebrated Râjâ Rasâlu. The râjâ comes with his pet parrot of supernatural wisdom to Nîlâ City and finds an old woman, six of whose seven sons have been already sent by the king to feed a certain giant. It is now her seventh son’s turn, and he is to be sent that day for the giant’s dinner, together with a basket of bread and a buffalo. The râjâ offers himself in place of the youth. It turns out that there are in all seven giants, who are fated to be overcome by Râjâ Rasâlu. They candidly tell him, as these stupid monsters are accustomed to do, how to perform the feat. Taught by them, he looses the heel-ropes from his horse and drops the sword out of his hand. The ropes tie up the giants and the sword cuts them in pieces. But this is not enough to satisfy the conditions; and the giants, still living, are obliging enough to put seven frying-pans, one behind the other, and behind the frying-pans to arrange themselves one behind the other, so that their antagonist may conveniently loose an arrow from his bow to pierce them all through the frying-pans, and slay them at one blow in the predestined manner. A giantess, their sister, however, escaped to a cave. The hero pursued her, and placed a statue of himself at the mouth of the cave, so that, being afraid to venture forth again, she was starved to death within.[63.1]