‘Who’s there?’ asked he.
‘It is I!’ she replied, as dolefully as before, and told him what was required of her now.
‘You see now what it is to have paid no attention to what I told you,’ answered Monsu Mostro. ‘I told you not to forget the comb I gave you. If you had not forgotten that none of this would have happened. That comb is your remedy now;’ and with that he shut the door.
But she went home and combed her hair with the comb he had given her; and not only the horns went away, but her hair grew down quite to her heels and swept the ground. But the other two were jealous when they saw that she had beaten them in all three trials, and they came to her to ask how she made her hair grow, and she sent them to the palace of Monsu Mostro to ask.
But as they only came out of jealousy, he told them to make themselves two pitch nightcaps and sleep in them; and when they got up in the morning, instead of having longer hair, all the hair they had came off.
But she was at length given to the prince, and they were married amid great rejoicing.
[The two preceding stories represent the Roman contribution to the stories of visits to the underground world and the Bluebeard group. I have others (particularly one called ‘Il Cavolo d’ Oro’, the ‘Golden Cabbage’) more like the general run of them. The two I have selected have this difference, that in neither instance does the subterranean ruler represent the Devil. ‘Monsu Mostro,’ is most disinterested in his generosity. As usual with the Roman versions, all that is terrible is eliminated. For other versions, see Ralston, pp. 98–100; and for a somewhat similar story, the ‘Water Snake,’ p. 116. Much in the Norse, ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon,’ is like the ‘Rè Moro;’ so is ‘The Old Dame and her Hen,’ though the later details of that story are more like the Tirolean version, which I have given in ‘Laxehale’s Wives,’ in ‘Household Stories from the Land of Hofer.’ The German version given as ‘Fitchers Vogel,’ Grimm, p. 177, has more of the horrid element than any of the others. In the version of ‘Tündér Ilona’ given in Graf Mailath’s ‘Magyarische Sagen’ (a rather different version from that told me at Pesth, which I have given at p. 20–1), Prince Argilus loses his bride and her kingdom, and has to begin all his labours over again, through looking into a closed chamber which Tündér Ilona had bid him not to open in her absence. But heroic action abounds in the Hungarian tales, just as it is wanting in the Roman ones, and in this, and in many details, particularly in the enthusiasm for magic horses, they are singularly like the Gaelic.
The ‘Rè Moro’ is perhaps nearer ‘Beauty and the Beast’ than ‘Bluebeard.’ I had a version of this given me in the following form, under the title of ‘The Enchanted Rose-Tree.’
[1] At what period the title of honour of ‘Monsu’ got appended to the monster’s name is more than I can fix. [↑]