‘Tell me, or I will kill the lord whom you have wedded.’
Then Nita arose and said, ‘It shall not happen that you kill my lord. God send you burst.’[7]
The vampire heard what Nita said, and burst. Ay, he died, and burst for very rage. In the morning Nita arose and saw the floor swimming two hand’s-breadth deep in blood. Then Nita bade her father-in-law take out the vampire’s heart with all speed. Her father-in-law, the king, hearkened, and opened him and took out his heart, and gave it into Nita’s hand. And she went to the grave of her boy and dug the boy up, applied the heart, and the boy arose. And Nita went to her father and to her mother, and anointed them with the blood, and they arose. Then, looking on them, Nita told all the troubles she had borne, and what she had suffered at the hands of the vampire.
The word cĭohanó, which throughout I have rendered ‘vampire,’ is of course identical with Paspati’s Turkish-Romani tchovekhano, a ‘revenant’ or spectre, which, according to Miklosich, is an Armenian loan-word, and in other Gypsy dialects of Europe means ‘wizard, witch.’ This vampire story is a connecting link between the two meanings[8]; but whether the story itself is of Gypsy or of non-Gypsy origin is a difficult question. We have four versions of it—two of them Gypsy, viz., this from Roumania, and one in Friedrich Müller’s Beiträge; and two non-Gypsy, viz., Ralston’s ‘The Fiend’ (Russian Folk-tales, pp. 10–17), and one from Croatia (Krauss’s Sagen und Märchen der Südslaven, i. 293). Hahn’s ‘Lemonitza’ (ii. 27) also offers analogies. Krauss’s and Müller’s are both much inferior to Ralston’s and our Roumanian-Gypsy one; and of them, although Ralston’s opens best, yet its close is immeasurably inferior. For in it, as in the Hungarian-Gypsy variant, the flower transforms itself merely to eat and drink. But Ralston’s story, it will [[19]]probably be urged, is a typical Russian story, so must needs be of Russian origin. To which I answer, Irish-wise, with the question, How then did it travel to Croatia, to the Gypsies of Hungary and Roumania? That the Gypsies, with never a church, should make church bells might seem unlikely, did we not know that at Edzell, in Forfarshire, there is a church bell that was cast by Gypsies in 1726. So Gypsy story-tellers may well have devised some domestic narratives for their auditors, not for themselves. And this story is possibly theirs who tell it best.
The merest glance at Ralston or Krauss will suffice to show that the Gypsy and Gentile stories are identical, that the likeness between them is no chance one, but that there has been transmission—either the Gypsies have borrowed from the Gentiles, or the Gentiles have borrowed from the Gypsies. Ralston and Krauss are readily accessible to the general folklorist; of Friedrich Müller’s version I append this brief résumé. It is compounded of the first half of his No. 4, which drifts off into quite another story about a dove and a soldier, and of the second half of his number No. 2, which opens with a variant of Grimm’s ‘Robber Bridegroom’ (cf. infra, No. 47, notes):—
The Holy Maid will not marry. The devil creeps in at window. ‘ “Now, thou fair maiden, wilt thou come to me or no?” “No”—this said the maiden—“to a dead one say I it, but to a living one No.” ’ Devil kills first her father, next her mother; lastly threatens herself. She tells the gravedigger, ‘Bear me not over the door [this supplies a lacuna in the Roumanian-Gypsy version], but bury me in a grave under the threshold, and take me not out from there.’ The girl then dies and is buried. Flower grows out of grave. King sees it and sends coachman to pluck it. He cannot [supplies lacuna], but king does, and takes it home. At night the flower turns into a girl and eats. Servant sees and tells. King watches next night. The girl bids him pluck the flower with a clean white cloth with the left hand,[9] then she will never change back into a rose, but remain a maiden [supplies lacuna]. King does so, and she marries him on condition he will never force her to go to church [supplies lacuna]. He rues his promise when he sees the other kings going to church with their wives. She consents: ‘But now, as thou wilt, I go. Thy God shall be also my God.’ When she comes into church, there are the twelve robbers [story reverts here to the first half of No. 2]. The robber cuts her throat and she dies. ‘If she is not dead, she is still alive.’
It will be seen that, rude and corrupt as these two fragments are, they supply some details wanting in the Roumanian-Gypsy version. They cannot, then, be borrowed from it, but it and they are clearly alike derived from some older, more perfect original.
[[20]]
No. 6.—God’s Godson
There was a queen. From youth to old age that queen never bore but one son. That son was a hero. So soon as he was born, he said to his father, ‘Father, have you no sword or club?’
‘No, my child, but I will order one to be made for you.’
The son said, ‘Don’t order one, father: I will go just as I am.’