He walks over it many times, and dances upon it, and nothing happened to him. She said, with a proud and smiling air, ‘That is the young man’; and out comes the exchanged things by both of them. Presently she orders a very large box to be brought in and to be opened, and out come some of the most costly uniforms that was ever wore on an emperor’s back; and when he dressed himself up, the King could scarcely look upon him from the dazzling of the gold and diamonds on his coat and other things. He orders his two brothers to be in confinement for a period of time; and before the Princess demands him to go with her to her own country, she pays a visit to the Gypsies’ camp, and she makes them some very handsome presents for being so kind to the young Prince. And she gives Jubal an invitation to go with them, which he accepts, also one of the girls for a nurse; wishes them a hearty farewell for a time, promising to see them again in some little time to come, by saying, ‘Cheer up, comrades, I’m a Rómani myself; I should like to see you in my country.’
They go back to the King and bids farewell, and tells him not to be so hasty another time to order people to beheaded[11] before having a proper cause for it. Off they go with all their army with them; but while the soldiers were striking their tents, he bethought himself of his Welsh harp, and had it sent for immediately to take with him in a beautiful wooden case. After they went over, they called to see [[232]]each of those three brothers whom the Prince had to stay with when he was on his way to the Castle of Melváles; and I can assure you, when they all got together, they had a very merry time of it. The last time I seen him, I play upon the Prince’s harp; and he told me he should like to see me again in North Wales. Ha! ha! ha! I am glad that I have come to the finish. I ought to have a drop of Scotch ale for telling all those lies.
As I said in my notes to No. 54, Mr. Joseph Jacobs has also reprinted this story, with alterations (e.g. of ‘head butcher’ to ‘headsman’), additions, and omissions of his own. Especially has he deleted every mention of Gypsies, whilst leaving in references to ‘tents,’ ‘camp,’ etc., which thus appear rather à propos de bottes. Such tampering with folk-tales reminds one somehow of your ‘restoring’ architect, called in about an old church. ‘Yes,’ he pronounces, ‘that window is Late Perpendicular, so will have to come out, and we’ll put in an Early English one according to the original design.’ Not that he knows the original design, but he pleases his dupes: some there be, however, that curse. But Grimm, Mr. Jacobs pleads, rewrote his fairy-tales. Maybe He did, but every folklorist is not a Grimm.
After this, Mr. Jacobs remarks that ‘the tale is scarcely a good example for Mr. Hindes Groome’s contention (in Transactions Folk-Lore Congress) for the diffusion of all folk-tales by means of gypsies as colporteurs. This is merely a matter of evidence, and of evidence there is singularly little, though it is indeed curious that one of Campbell’s best equipped informants should turn out to be a Gypsy. Even this fact, however, is not too well substantiated.’ As I have shown in my Introduction, I have never made such a contention; there, too, I have told all I know about Campbell’s informant—Mr. Jacobs, perhaps, may know more. But his oracular judgment, that this story is a poor example for my (real) contention, that is what staggers me, unbacked though it be by one tittle of counter-evidence. The following is all I can adduce in self-vindication.
My friend Mr. Sampson has got from Matthew Wood another Welsh-Gypsy version, called ‘I Valín Kalo Pāni’ (The Bottle of Black Water). ‘This,’ he writes, ‘is a variant of your “King and his Three Sons,” with which it agrees in most particulars, except of course Roberts’ own picturesque little touches, and that a bottle of black water takes the place of the three golden apples.’ Then, what I did not, could not know when I published In Gypsy Tents (1880), there is a closely parallel non-Gypsy variant in Professor Theodor Vernaleken’s In The Land of Marvels (Eng. trans. 1884), No. 52, pp. 304–9 and 360. It is called ‘The Accursed Garden,’ and comes from St. Pölden in Lower Austria. Here is a summary:—
A king has three sons, the youngest the handsomest. He falls sick, and learns he can only get better by eating a fruit from the [[233]]Accursed Garden. The brothers set out one after the other; the two eldest lose all their money gaming in an inn, and are put in jail (cf. No. 49, p. 184). The youngest son comes to a hermit’s in a great forest, inquires the way to the Accursed Garden, and gets a red ball, which, flung before him, will show the way. He next comes to a black dog, and sleeps three nights with him, then to a red dog, lastly to a white maiden. Before reaching the mountain on whose top is the garden he ties his horse to a fig-tree. He has to enter the garden at eleven, and leave before noon. In a castle in the midst of the garden he finds a sleeping lady, writes down his name and address, departs and is pursued by devouring beasts. Returning to the white maiden, he is desired by her to divide a grape into four parts, and to cast a part into each corner of her dwelling. Immediately it became a splendid palace. The red and black dogs are likewise changed into princes, and the hermit into a king. The prince comes up as his brothers are going to be hanged, buys them off, is robbed by them in the night of his fruit, receiving in its stead a poisoned one, and then is thrown into a valley. The late hermit discovers and revives him, but the king his father, finding his fruit is poisoned, orders him to be shot. But the servant spares him; and the young lady, arriving with a great army, proclaims that if the prince who fetched the fruit be not produced she will besiege the city. Then the servant tells how he spared the prince, who is sought for and brought to the king. He accurately describes the garden, and marries the princess.
This version is markedly inferior to our Welsh-Gypsy one; still, I know in all folklore of few closer parallels. And the two versions are separated by over four centuries and by more than a thousand miles. The ball of yarn on p. 221 recurs in two other Welsh-Gypsy stories, ‘The Black Dog of the Wild Forest’ (‘You follow this ball of worsted. Now it will take you right straight to a river’) and ‘The Green Man of Noman’s Land’ (‘She … gives him a ball of thread to place between the horse’s ears’). In Dasent’s Norse tale of ‘The Golden Palace that hung in the Air’ (Tales from the Fjeld, p. 291) an old hag gives the hero ‘a grey ball of wool, which he had only to roll on before him and he would come to whatever place he wished.’ In Addy’s Household Tales, p. 50, there is a curious but poorly told story from Wensley in Derbyshire, ‘The Little Red Hairy Man,’ a variant of our ‘Mare’s Son’ (No. 20) and ‘Twopence-halfpenny’ (No. 58). Here the little man throws ‘a small copper ball on the ground, and it rolled away, and Jack followed it until it came to a castle made of copper, and flew against the door.’ So with a silver ball and a silver castle, and a golden ball and a golden castle. On which it is just worth remarking that underground castles of copper, silver, and gold occur in No. 58, p. 245, in a story told to Campbell of Islay by a London Gypsy (Tales of the West [[234]]Highlands, iv. 143), and in Ralston’s The Norka, pp. 75–76. In Wratislaw’s Hungarian-Slovenish story of ‘The Three Lemons,’ p. 63,[12] we find castles of lead, silver, and gold, and at each the hero gets dumplings of the same metals, which he afterwards throws before him, when they fix themselves on the glass hill, and permit him to ascend (cf. too, our ‘Three Dragons,’ pp. 152–4; Irish folk-tale in Folk-lore Journal, i. 318; and Folk lore for December 1890, p. 495). In Hahn’s ‘Filek-Zelebi’ (No. 73, ii. 69) the heroine has to follow three golden apples; and in ‘The Wicked Queens’ (J. H. Knowles’s Folk-tales of Kashmir, p. 401) a jogi gives a boy a pebble, telling him to ‘throw it on before and to follow its leadings.’
The well-known Sleeping Beauty recurs in two other Gypsy stories—the Moravian one of ‘The Princess and the Forester’s Son’ (p. 147), which offers marked analogies to John Roberts’s tale, and that from the Bukowina, ‘The Winged Hero’ (pp. 100–104), which is very Oriental in character. Whether she was ever familiar to English or Scottish folklore I do not know; but Scott in chapter xxvi. of The Antiquary alludes to her.
For the three helpful brothers, cf. F. A. Steel’s Wide-awake Stories, p. 35–36; and for the prohibition not to look about [behind], Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, p. 140.
No. 56.—The Five Trades
Once there were a sailor and other four men. One was a smith, and the other was a soldier and a tailor, and the last was an innkeeper. The sailor asked the smith to come upon the sea. The smith said, ‘No, I must go and do some work.’ ‘What is your work?’ ‘To heat iron,’ says the smith, ‘and make it into shoes for horses.’ The sailor asked the other three to come on board his ship. The soldier said he must go to make facings and marchings; and the tailor said, ‘I must go and make clothes to keep you warm.’ And the innkeeper said, ‘I am going to make beer to make you drunk, that you may all of you go to the devil.’ That’s all of that.
This little temperance apologue by a non-teetotaler is one of the very few Gypsy stories with a moral.
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