And he said, ‘My sword slays.’
And she sent back a letter, ‘The sword alone slays; send me another sword, and I will send this one to you.’
She sent him the sword, and he then said, ‘Set yourself now to battle with me.’
And he went in hope. But the emperor slew him, and [[120]]cut him all in pieces, and put him in the saddle-bags, and placed him on his horse, and said, ‘Whence thou didst bear him living, bear him dead.’[27]
The horse carried him home, thither to that lady who was of stone. She cried, ‘Bring him to me.’ She laid him on a table, and put him all together; and she sprinkled him with dead water, and he became whole; and she sprinkled him with living water, and he arose.[28]
‘Go back; take you this purse, you have but to wish and you will find it full of money. And go to that Armenian, and give him whatever he wants, and tell him you will turn yourself into a horse. Take a hair from my tail,[29] and bind it round you like a girdle, and fling a somersault.’[30]
So he turned himself into a horse; and the Armenian took him, and led him into the city. The emperor bought him, and mounted him. He dashed him to the earth, and he died. The horse took the sword in his mouth, and went to the Armenian. The Armenian loosened the hair, and he became a man again. He made the Armenian king; and he departed home to his mistress, the first one, and wedded her. And he became emperor.
A mere ruin of a folk-tale, but what a fine ruin. The cat reminds one of Grimm’s No. 106, ‘The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Cat’ (ii. 78, 406), where the cat takes the hero into an enchanted castle, and gives him to eat and to drink. But Grimm’s No. 92, ‘The King of the Golden Mountain’ (ii. 28, 390), comes much closer to our Gypsy story. There the hero has three nights running to let himself be tortured in a bewitched castle by twelve black men till twelve o’clock, so to set free an enchanted maiden. Grimm’s No. 121, ‘The King’s Son who feared Nothing’ (ii. 134, 419), should also be compared, and our Welsh-Gypsy story, ‘Ashypelt’ (No. 57). The latter half of ‘The Enchanted City’ is identical with Krauss’s No. 47 (i. 224), a Slovenian story. For the magic sword cf. infra, p. 160; Clouston’s notes to Lane’s Continuation of Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale’ (Chaucer Soc. 1888, pp. 372–381); Wratislaw’s Polish story, ‘The Spirit of a buried Man,’ No. 18, p. 122; and F. A. Steel’s Wide-awake Stories, p. 62. Playing cards with the devil or a monster occurs also in our No. 63 (p. 256), and in folk-tales from Russia, Germany, French Flanders, Lorraine, and Brittany (cf. Ralston, p. 375; Grimm, No. 4, i. 16, 346; and Cosquin, i. 28; ii. 254, 259, 260).
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