KING OTHO.[1]
In this case the merchant, when he goes out to buy his wares, asks his three daughters what he shall bring them. The eldest asks for fine dresses, the second for beautiful shawls, the third for nothing but some sand out of the garden of King Otho. The king had registered sentence of death against anyone who should ask for the sand. But in consideration of a bribe of three hundred scudi the gardener gives him a little.
When she gets it, the daughter burns a little in the evening, when the sisters are gone to a ball. Instantly King Otho comes, and falls in love with her. She gives him a most exquisite pair of knee-bands she has embroidered, before he goes away. The second night she gives him a handkerchief of her work, and the third a beautiful necktie.
After this, her father insists one evening that she should go to the ball. Her sisters say that if she goes they shall stay away. When she is gone they burn down her room, and in it all the sand of King Otho’s garden. If the king came quickly for the burning of a little pinch, he naturally comes in exceeding greater haste at the burning of the whole quantity: in such haste that he is wounded all over with the blazing beams and broken glass. There is a great explosion.[2] As he knew nothing about the spite of the sisters, he could only think that the mischief arose from the misconduct of her to whom the sand had been given, and determines accordingly to have nothing more to do with her.
When she comes home, and finds what has happened, she is in despair. She dresses like a man and goes away. In the night, in a cave where she takes shelter, she hears an ogre and ogress talking over what has happened, and they say that the only cure is an ointment made of their blood.[3] She shoots them both, and takes their blood and heals the king with it. The king offers any kind of reward the supposed doctor will name; but she will have nothing but some of the sand of the garden. She contrives, however, to discover the knee-bands, the handkerchief, and the necktie she had given him, and asks him what they are. ‘Oh, only the presents of a faithless lover,’ he replies. She then insists he should give them up to her, which he does, and she goes away.
When she gets home she burns a pinch of the sand, and the king is forced by its virtue to appear; but he comes in great indignation, and accuses her of wounding him. She replies it was not she who wounded him, but who healed him. He is incredulous; and she shows him the knee-bands, handkerchief, and necktie, which convince him he owes his healing to her. They make peace, and are married.
[Mr. Ralston gives a very pretty counterpart of so much of this story as relates to the transformation of a human being into a flower, at p. 15 of the story commencing at page 10, and ‘Aschenputtel,’ Grimm, p. 93, has something like it; but I do not recall any European story in which a person is actually wounded and half-killed by damage done to a tree mysteriously connected with him. There is something like it in the ‘trees of life’ which people plant, and their withering is to be a token that harm has befallen them.
Overhearing the advice of supernatural beasts under a tree occurs in the Norse ‘True and Untrue,’ and is very common in all sorts of ways, everywhere. It enters, too, into the analogous Italian Tirolean tale of ‘I due cavallari,’ where witches figure instead of the orco and orchessa.
Next, are four stories in which many incidents of the Cinderella type are set in a different framework; they are represented in the Gaelic by ‘The King who wanted to marry his Daughter;’ at the end of which reference will be found to other versions, where are details occurring in one or other of the following: that from Straparola is naturally the most like the Roman, but it is not like any one of them all throughout, and forms a remarkable link between the first Roman and the two Gaelic versions. The girl’s answer, that she ‘came from the country of candlesticks,’ in the second version, is noteworthy, because it connects it with the Roman story of the ‘Candeliera,’ at the same time that it conveys no sense in its own. The box in the Gaelic versions recalls, just as Mr. Campbell says, the fine old chests which served for conveying home the corredo (including much more than trousseau in its modern use) of the bride, which are not only preserved as heirlooms and curiosities in many an Italian palace, but in many a museum also; there are some very handsome ones at Perugia. And yet it is just in the Italian versions that the box loses this character. In Straparola’s, it is a wardrobe; in the two versions of ‘Maria di Legno,’ a wooden statue; in ‘La Candeliera,’ it has the shape of a candlestick. In the third version of ‘Maria di Legno,’ the box used is only an old press that happens to be in the deserted tower.