We must regard the first part of this romance—down to the end of the third chapter—as belonging to the wide cycle of folk-tales in which a number of brothers set out in quest of some wonderful and much desired object, and the youngest is always the successful one; but he is deprived of the prize by his envious and malicious brothers, who generally throw him into a well, and returning home claim the credit of the achievement. In the end, however, the young hero exposes the fraud, and his rascally and cowardly brethren are put to shame. Several of the incidents in the brothers’ quest of the magical Rose with which to cure their father’s sight are paralleled in the story of the Water of Life, in Grimm’s Kinder und Hausmärchen, and in the Norse and German stories of the Golden Bird. Thus in our romance the four elder princes, through their pleasure-seeking disposition, fall into the toils of an artful courtesan, while the youngest pluckily proceeds to fairyland and procures the Rose of Bakáwalí, of which his brothers deprive him on his way home. In such stories as I have mentioned the elder brothers, if not deservedly enchanted in some manner on the road, waste their time at a wayside inn, and the younger is aided in his quest by some animal, troll, or dwarf, to whom he had done a friendly turn: in our romance the young prince is helped by a good-natured dív, or demon.
The prediction of the astrologers, with which the romance begins, that if the king should ever cast his eyes on his newly-born son he should instantly become blind, has many analogues in other Eastern tales. For example, in the Bakhtyár Náma we read that a king of Persia, after being long childless, one night, in a dream, is addressed by an aged man: “The Lord has complied with thy request and to-morrow thou shalt have a son, but in his seventh year a lion shall seize and carry him off to the top of a mountain, from which he shall fall, rolling in blood and clay.” The vazírs say that the decrees of Destiny cannot be withstood, but the king declares that he will do so, and then summons his astrologers, who say that the king after twenty years shall perish by the hand of his own son. The king causes an underground dwelling to be constructed, in which he places his child and the nurse. When the prince is seven years of age, a lion rushes into the cave, devours the nurse, carries off the boy, and drops him down a mountain. The child is found by one of the king’s secretaries, who causes him to be properly educated. In course of time the youth is appointed armour-bearer to the king, who, of course, does not know that he is his own son, and in fighting with an enemy who had invaded his kingdom, in the confusion of the battle, the youth cuts off the king’s hand, supposing him to be on the enemy’s side, and before dying the king ascertains that his son had caused his death.
In the Bagh o Bahár (see the Appendix, page [478]), a young prince, in consequence of a prediction of the astrologers that he was menaced with great danger until his fourteenth year, is confined in a vault lined with felt, in order that he should not behold the sun and the moon till the fatal period was passed. In Mr. Ralston’s Tibetan Tales, the diviners declare to a king that he shall have a son who shall take his life and usurp the royal power, setting the diadem on his own head. And we have a familiar instance in the Arabian tale of the Third Calender, where the astrologers having predicted that the newly-born son of a jeweller should be killed when fifteen years old by ’Ajíb the son of King Khasib, the child is placed in an underground apartment in an island. In the Turkish story-book known as the History of the Forty Vasírs, the soothsayers predict that a king’s son shall be much afflicted and wander in strange lands, with tribulation and pain for his companions, from his thirtieth till he has attained his sixtieth year. In the Norwegian story of Rich Peter the Pedlar the star-gazers foretell that his daughter should one day wed a poor man’s son. And in classical legends we have the story of Danae, the daughter of Acrisius, king of Argos, by Eurydice, who was confined in a brazen tower because an oracle had said that his daughter’s son should put him to death.
V—The Persian Stories have been selected from a collection translated by Mr. Edward Rehatsek, and published at Bombay in 1871, under the title of Amusing Stories. They occur in the Persian work, Mahbúb ul-Kalúb, of which some account has been given in connection with the first two romances in the present volume. The first of these stories, that of the Three Deceitful Women, is very diverting, and, as I have shown in the Appendix, has its counterparts in France and Spain. It belongs to the numerous stories of the Woman’s Wiles cycle, and certainly represents the ladies in no very amiable character. But as a set-off to this tale of the depravity of women—the subject of many European mediæval stories and jests, as well as of Asiatic fictions—we have also stories of the wickedness of men, such as that of the Envious Vazír and that of the Kází of Ghazní—“blackguards both”!
HISTORY OF NASSAR.