All de oder genlemen wuz fit to kill him, an’ dey says, ‘Pooh! pooh! tu’n dat boy out; it can’t be him.’ [[208]]
But de ole king says, ‘Now, my boy, let’s see what you got.’
Well, he showed the dimant ring, with her name into it, an’ de fiery dragin’s tongue. Dordi! how dese genlemen were mesmerised when he showed his ’thority, and de king tole him, ‘You shall have my destate, an’ marry my darter.’
An’ he got married to dis heah gal, an’ got all de ole king’s destate. An’ den de stepfather came an’ wanted to own him, but de young king didn’t know such a man.
A bull-calf helps twins in a Russian story summarised by Ralston, p. 134; the squeezing of the cheese crud can be matched from the Slovak-Gypsy story of ‘The Gypsy and the Dragon’ (No. 22, p. 84; cf. also Hahn, i. 152 and ii. 211). For the slaying of a dragon with the aid of helpful animals, and so rescuing a princess, and for the recognition of the rescuer by means of the dragon’s tongues, cf. Grimm’s No. 60, ‘The Two Brothers’ (i. 244–264 and 418–422). That story must be known to the Gypsies of Hungary, for we get a rude version of it in the latter half of Dr. Friedrich Müller’s No. 5, whose first half we have summarised on p. 34. The hero here comes to a city deprived of its water by twelve dragons, who are also going to devour the king’s daughter. He undertakes to rescue her, but falls asleep with his head on her knees. The twelve white dragons roar beneath the earth, and then emerge one by one from the fountain, but are torn in pieces by the hero’s twelve wild animals, whose lives he has spared when hunting. Thereupon the water becomes plentiful, and the hero marries the princess. Her former lover, however, 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 that herb in its mouth, robs it thereof, and is running away, but at the snake’s request gives back a bit. They then resuscitate their master, who sends a challenge to the lover by the lion. The marriage is just about to come off, but the princess reads, weeps, and breaks off the match. In comes the hero, and having packed off the lover, remarries her. ‘If they are not dead, they are still alive.’ Cf. our No. 30, ‘The Rich and the Poor Brother,’ pp. 112–117, for stopping the water[9]; No. 29, ‘Pretty-face,’ p. 111, for the snake-leaf; and No. 42, ‘The Dragon,’ p. 143. None of these stories, however, offers more than analogues to ‘De Little Bull-calf,’ whose humour as to the dragon’s tongue is peculiarly its own. The tongue as the test of who killed the demon occurs in ‘Kara and Guja’ (A. Campbell’s Santal Folk-tales, 1891, pp. 20–21).
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[2] So in the Bukowina-Gypsy story of ‘The Mother’s Chastisement,’ No. 9, p. 29. Cf. Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, p. 245. [↑]