Sometimes, however, it seems to me, we get sure tokens of recent diffusion. Thus in the folk-tales to which Sir George Cox, Professor de Gubernatis, and their fellow-mythologists assign a prehistoric antiquity, one of the commonest incidents is where the hero and heroine, flying from a demon, magician, or ogre (the heroine’s father often), transform themselves into a church and priest. We find the incident in Lorraine, Brittany, Picardy, many parts of both Germany and Italy, the Tyrol, Transylvania, Hungary, Croatia, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and [[lxxii]]Brazil, as well as among the Gypsies of Turkey, the Bukowina, and Galicia (cf. Cosquin, i. 106; and my own pp. 127, 196). What was the prehistoric form of the church? Was it a tope, a stone circle, something of the kind? That well may be. But how comes it that the development of the prehistoric form has in all these widely-separated countries reached exactly the same stage, and there stopped? Why has not the stone circle become in one case a stone-heap with a stone-breaker, in another a pound with a horse in it, in a third a field with a rubbing-post? Why always the modern Christian notion of a church? But the difficulty vanishes if one may suppose that the Gypsies, starting from the Balkan Peninsula at a date when churches were familiar objects, which a pursuer would naturally pass, carried with them the modern version of the story to Russia, Spain, and the other countries in which it is told to-day. Similarly, in Gypsy stories, and in stories current in countries wide apart, one finds such incidents as the hero falling in love through a portrait, the hero playing cards with the devil, the hero carrying a Bellerophon letter, the hero looking through an all-seeing telescope. Such stories in their original form may be of indefinable antiquity; but the recurrence of their developed form amongst Slavs and Teutons and Celts would seem to be due to recent transmission, unless one is prepared to maintain that our primæval Aryan ancestors were acquainted with portrait-painting, with playing-cards, with the art of writing, and with telescopes.
The Anthropological Theory.
In his Introduction to Mrs. Hunt’s admirable translation of Grimm, Mr. Andrew Lang thus expounded his ‘Anthropological’ theory of folk-tales:—
‘As to the origin of the wild incidents in Household Tales, let any one ask himself this question: Is there anything in the frequent appearance of cannibals, in kinship with animals, in magic, in abominable cruelty, that would seem unnatural to a savage? Certainly not; all these things are familiar to his world. Do all these things occur on almost every page of Grimm? Certainly they do. Have they been natural and familiar incidents to the educated German mind during the historic age? No one will venture to say so. These notions, then, have survived in peasant tales from the time when the ancestors of the Germans were like Zulus or Maoris or Australians.’
Gypsy Savagery.
It is an interesting, the most interesting theory; still I cannot forbear pointing out that many of Mr. Lang’s survivals of dead Teutonic savagery are living realities in Gypsy tents. Matty Cooper, discoursing to his ‘dear little wooden bear,’ and offering it beer to drink; ‘Gypsy Mary,’ who ‘washed herself away from God Almighty’; Riley Smith and Emily Pinfold, [[lxxiii]]who both ‘sold their blood to the Devil’; Mrs. Draper, who vowed that, sooner than touch beer or spirits, she would go to Loughton churchyard, and drink the blood of her dead son lying there; Riley Bosville with his two wives, and old Charles Pinfold with his three; Lementina Lovell, who heard the fairy music; her grandson, Dimiti, who lay awake once in Snaky Lane, and watched the little fairies in the oak-tree; and Ernest Smith (1871–98), who one July night in the grounds of the Edinburgh Electrical Exhibition of 1890 saw ‘two dear little teeny people, about two feet high, and he upp’d and flung stones at ’em’—I myself have known eight of these Gypsies, and kinsfolk of the two others. It is not sixteen years since an English Gypsy girl, to work her vengeance on her false Gentile lover, cut the heart out of a living white pigeon, and flung the poor bird, yet struggling, on the fire. It is barely fifty years since old Mrs. Smith was buried at Troston, near Ixworth, after travelling East Anglia for half a century with a sparrow, which, like the raven in Grimm’s story, told her all manner of secrets. (Cf. Mr. Lang’s ‘4. Savage idea.—Animals help favoured men and women.’) Then, there is the Gypsy system of tabu, by which wife and child renounce for ever the favourite food or drink of the dead husband or father, or the name of the deceased is dropped clean out of use, any survivors who happen to bear it adopting another. There is the belief in the evil eye; there are caste-like rules of ceremonial purity; and on the Continent there is, or was lately, actual idolatry—tree-worship among German Gypsies, and the worship of the moon-god, Alako, among their brethren of Scandinavia. Cannibalism. Nor even for cannibalism need Mr. Lang go far back or far afield. In 1782 in Hungary, next door to Germany, forty-five Gypsies, men and women, were beheaded, broken on the wheel, quartered alive, or hanged, for cannibalism. Arrested first by way of wise precaution, they were racked till they confessed to theft and murder, then were brought to the spot where they said their victims should be buried, and, no victims forthcoming, were promptly racked again. ‘We ate them,’ at last was their despairing cry, and straightway the Gypsies were hurried to the scaffold; straightway the newspapers all over Europe rang with blood-curdling narratives of ‘Gypsy cannibalism.’ Then, when it all was over, the Emperor Joseph sent a commission down, the outcome of whose investigations was that nobody was missing, that no one had been murdered—but the Gypsies. That was in Hungary, a century ago; but even in England, in 1859, a judge seems to have entertained a similar suspicion. In that year, at the York assizes, a Gypsy lad, Guilliers Heron, was tried for a robbery, of which, by [[lxxiv]]the bye, he was innocent. ‘One of the prisoner’s brothers’ (I quote from the Times of Thursday, 10th March, p. 11), ‘said they were all at tea with the prisoner at five o’clock in their tent, and, when asked what they had to eat, he said they had a “hodgun” cooked, which is the provincial name for a hedgehog. His Lordship (Mr. Justice Byles): “What do you say you had—cooked urchin?” Gypsy: “Yes, cooked hodgun. I’m very fond of cooked hodgun” (with a grin). His Lordship’s mind seemed to be filled with horrible misgivings, when the meaning of the provincialism was explained amid much laughter.’ Cannibalism is a common feature of Gypsy folk-tales, as this collection will show; but it is far commoner, and on a far grander scale, in the folk-tales of India, where a rakshasi makes nothing of polishing off the entire population of a city, plus the goats and sheep, horses and elephants. How does Mr. Lang account for this, for Germany remained savage long ages after India? I rather fancy, though I cannot be certain, that cannibalism in folk-tales tapers off pretty regularly westward from India.[30]