I hesitated whether to give this story; it is so hopelessly corrupt, it seems such absolute nonsense. Yet it enshrines beyond question, however confusedly, the widespread and ancient belief that to ensure one’s foundation one should wall up a human victim. So St. Columba buried St. Oran alive in the foundation of his monastery; in Western folklore, however, the victim is usually an infant—a bastard sometimes, in one case (near Göttingen) a deaf-mute. But in south-eastern Europe it is almost always a woman—the wife of the master-builder, whose name, as here, is Manoli. Reinhold Köhler has treated the subject admirably in his Aufsätze über Märchen und Volkslieder (Berlin, 1894, pp. 36–47); there one finds much to enlighten the darkness of our original. ‘God send a wind,’ etc., is the husband’s prayer as he sees his wife coming towards him, and hopes to avert her doom; ‘My ring has fallen into the water,’ etc., must also be his utterance, when he finds that it is hopeless, that she has to die. The Gypsy story is probably of high antiquity, for two at least of the words in it were quite or almost meaningless to the nomade Gypsy who told it (Paspati, p. 190). The masons of south-eastern Europe are, it should be noticed, largely Gypsies; and a striking Indian parallel may be pointed out in the Santal story of ‘Seven Brothers and their Sister’ (Campbell’s Santal Folk-tales, pp. 106–110). Here seven brothers set to work to dig a tank, but find no water, so, by the advice of a yogi, give their only sister to the spirit of the tank. ‘The tank was soon full to the brim, and the girl was drowned.’ And then comes a curious mention of a Dom, or Indian vagrant musician, whose name is probably identical with Doum, Lom, or Rom, the Gypsy of Syria, Asia Minor, and Europe.
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[1] Told by an old sedentary Gypsy woman of Adrianople. [↑]
[2] Lit. ‘the lad there became dry’; but that is how an English Gypsy would put it. [↑]