And the youngest brother said, ‘My brother will appeal to you for judgment; deliver a good one.’
The emperors met, and bowed themselves; and the father-in-law said, ‘Deliver judgment for this man.’
‘I will. You have made her a she-ass; make her a woman again.’
‘But she’ll have to behave herself in the future.’
‘She shall,’ said her father, ‘only do restore her.’
He gave her a crab-apple, and she ate it, and became a woman again. The emperor took off his crown and set it on his head. ‘Do you take my crown, do you be emperor.’ [[99]]
‘Das goldene Hahn,’ a Greek story from Ziza (Hahn, No. 36, i. 227), presents a very close parallel:—The Jew knows that whoever eats the head will be king, whoever eats the heart will be able to read men’s hearts, and whoever eats the liver will every morning find a thousand piastres under his pillow.… The three boys, coming from school, eat them.… Their mother tries to poison them.… By advice of the middle boy they do not eat.… Finally they go out into the world.
The episode of the crown, suggestive of the Arthurian legend, is wanting in Hahn. The notion of a contest in money occurs, to the best of my knowledge, in no other folk-tale; but we meet with it in the second fytt of the English ballad of ‘The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green.’ And at Peterborough Fair, in September 1872, a Gypsy told me, as a matter of history, of a similar contest between two Gypsies: each had to show a guinea for the other’s.
Grimm’s ‘Two Brothers’ (No. 60, i. 244, 418), with its variants, should be carefully compared, also his ‘Donkey Cabbages’ (No. 122, ii. 139, 419), which is a recast of the latter portion of our Bukowina-Gypsy story, for we get bird’s heart … gold pieces under pillow … emetic … donkey cabbage … recovery through different kind of cabbage … punishment … restoration … emetic proposed. It is noteworthy also that the conclusion of Grimm’s ‘Two Brothers’ can be matched by the conclusion of a Hungarian-Gypsy story (Friedrich Müller’s No. 5), whose first half I have summarised on p. 34. Its hero next comes to a city deprived of its water by twelve dragons, who are also going to eat the king’s daughter. He undertakes to rescue her, but falls asleep with his head on her knee. The twelve white dragons roar under the earth, and then emerge one by one from out of the fountain, to be torn in pieces by the hero’s twelve wild animals. The water becomes plentiful, and the hero marries the princess. But a former lover of hers poisons him. The twelve animals find his grave, and dig him up. They go in quest of the healing herb; and the hare, ‘whose eyes are always open, sees a snake with it in his mouth, robs the snake of it, and runs off, but at the snake’s request restores a portion.’ They then resuscitate their master. (Cf. Grimm’s ‘The Two Snake-leaves,’ No. 16, i. 70; Hahn, ii. 204, 260, 274; and our Bukowina-Gypsy story, ‘Pretty-face,’ No. 29, p. 111). The hero sends a challenge by the lion to the former lover, who is just about to wed the princess. She reads, weeps, and breaks off the match. In comes the hero, and they are married again. ‘If they are not dead, they are still alive.’
Clouston epitomises Roman and Indian versions of our story (i. 93–99), but omits ‘The Two Brothers’ in F. A. Steel’s Wide-awake Stories, pp. 138–152, and ‘Saiyid and Said’ in Knowles’s Folk-tales of Kashmir, pp. 74–97. The last offers wonderfully close analogies to the Gypsy story. Cf. also Krauss, i. 187; and Vuk’s Servian story, No. 26.
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