Gypsy Story-tellers.
Campbell of Islay has shown us a Gypsy professional story-teller in London, and Paspati has shown us a Gypsy professional story-teller, the grandson of one at Constantinople. That is not much, perhaps; but there are several more indications of the transmission of folk-tales by Gypsies. Bakht, the Rómani word for ‘luck’ or ‘fortune,’ has passed, not merely into Albanian folk-tales, but into the Greek and Turkish languages, as I show in a footnote on p. 53; and a good many of the following seventy-six stories seem to show unmistakable tokens of the practised raconteur’s art. ‘Let us leave the dogs, and return to the girl,’ in No. 47; ‘Now we’ll leave the master to stand a bit, and go back to the mother,’ in No. 68; ‘And I came away, told the story,’ in Nos. 6, 7, 8, and 15; ‘And I left them there, and came and told my story to your lordships,’ in No. 10; ‘I was there, and heard everything that happened,’ in No. 12; ‘Away I came, the tale have told,’ in No. 18; ‘Now you’ve got it,’ in No. 28; ‘If they are not dead, they are still alive,’ in Nos. 41 and 42, and also in Hungarian-Gypsy stories; ‘The floor there was made of paper, and I came away here,’ in No. 43; ‘So if they are not dead, they are living together,’ in No. 44; ‘Excuse me for saying it,’ in No. 55; ‘She was delivered (pray, excuse me) of a boy,’ in No. 46; ‘And the last time I was there I played my harp for them, and got to go again,’ in No. 54—these all sound like tags or formulas of the professional story-teller. Léon Zafiri’s usual wind-up, says Paspati (p. 421), ran: ‘And I too, I was there, and I ate, and I drank, and I have come to tell you the story.’
Story-telling a living Gypsy art.
A tree can never be quite dead as long as it puts forth shoots; I fancy the very latest shoot in the whole Yggdrasil of European folk-tales [[lxxxi]]is the episode in ‘The Tinker and his Wife’ (No. 70), where the tinker buys a barrel of beer, and says, ‘Now, my wench, you make the biggest penny out of it as ever you can,’ and she goes and sells the whole barrel to a packman for one of the old big pennies. That episode cannot be earlier than the introduction of the new bronze coinage in 1861; it looks as though it must itself be a recent coinage of Cornelius Price, or of Nebuchadnēzar, his uncle. But, there, I have known a Gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale impromptu. She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand, with ‘a lot o’ real tip-top gentry’; and ‘Reía,’ she said to me afterwards, ‘I’ll tell you the comicalest thing as ever was. We’d pulled up, to put the brake on; and there was a púro hotchiwítchi (old hedgehog) come and looked at us through the hedge, looked at me hard. I could see he’d his eye upon me. And home he’d go, that old hedgehog, to his wife, and “Missus,” he’d say, “what d’ ye think? I seen a little Gypsy gal just now in a coach and four hosses”; and “Dábla!” she’d say, “sawkúmni ’as vardé kenáw” ’ (Bless us! every one now keeps a carriage).
Possible Gypsy influences.
I have told English Gypsies Grimm’s tale of ‘The Hare and the Hedgehog,’ and they always pronounce that it must be a Rómani story (‘Who else would have gone for to make up a tale about hedgehogs?’)[35] But the question whether in many non-Gypsy collections there are not a number of folk-tales that present strong internal evidence of their Gypsy origin is a difficult question; it would take us too far afield, and could lead to no really definite results. Still, I must say a word or two. In Hahn’s fine variant (ii. 267) of our ‘Mare’s Son’ from the island of Syra a vizier travels from town to town, seeking a lad as handsome as the prince. At last he is passing through a Gypsy quarter,[36] when he hears a boy singing: ‘his voice was beautiful as any nightingale’s.’ He looks through a door, and sees a boy, who is every whit as handsome as the prince, so he purchases this boy, and the boy plays a leading part in the story. The abject contempt in which Gypsies are held throughout the whole of south-eastern Europe renders it probable that none but a Gypsy would thus have described a member of the race. The story, too, from its opening clause, a greeting to the ‘goodly company,’ would seem to have been told by [[lxxxii]]a professional story-teller—a kinsman, possibly, of Léon Zafiri. Krauss’s Croatian story (No. 98) of ‘The Gypsy and the Nine Franciscans’ is just ‘Les Trois Bossus’ of the trouvère Durant (Liebrecht’s Dunlop, p. 209); yet it has, to my thinking, a thoroughly Rómani ring. In Campbell’s Gaelic story of ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’ (No. 1) the hero’s young wife is carried off by a giant, and, following their track, he comes thrice on the site of a fire. If I were telling that story to Gypsies, I should say, not site of a fire, but fireplace: I fancy I can hear the Gypsies’ exclamations—‘Dere! my blessed! following de fireplaces. Course he’d know den which way de giant had gone.’ I could cite a good score of similar instances; but I will content myself with this footnote from Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (ed. 1873, iv. 102):—‘Besides the prophetic powers ascribed to the Gypsies in most European countries, the Scottish peasants believe them possessed of the power of throwing upon bystanders a spell, and causing them to see the thing that is not.… The receipt to prevent the operation of these deceptions was to use a sprig of four-leaved clover. I remember to have heard (certainly very long ago, for at that time I believed the legend), that a Gypsy exercised his glamour over a number of persons at Haddington, to whom he exhibited a common dunghill cock, trailing what appeared to the spectators a massy oaken trunk. An old man passed with a cart of clover; he stopped, and picked out a four-leaved blade; the eyes of the spectators were opened,—and the oaken trunk appeared to be a bulrush.’ But that is just Grimm’s No. 149, ‘The Beam’: what folklorist has ever associated ‘The Beam’ with the Gypsies?