From the East, doubtless, the idea was brought to Europe and utilised in the romance of Huon of Bordeaux, where we read that the beard and molars of the Saracen amír—the procuring of which was the condition of the hero’s pardon by Charlemagne—were sewed up by Oberon, King of the Fairies, in the side of Gerames, the uncle of Duke Huon.[298]
Bakáwalí at Indra’s Court—p. [317].
In the Kashmírí tale of Gullala Sháh (Mr. Knowles’ collection), a fair princess, Panj Phúl, falls in love with the hero, and her father, when he comes to know of this, transforms her to wood and causes her to be placed in a public garden, as a warning to other fairy damsels not to bestow their affections on human beings. Gullala Sháh, instructed by the vazír, whose daughter he had already married, burns the wood, and pouring water on the ashes, Panj Phúl, as in Bakáwalí’s case, is restored to life.
Bahrám Transformed Into a Bird—p. [346].
In No. 16 of the Burmese collection of tales entitled Decisions of the Princess Thoodhamma Tsari—which has been translated into English by Capt. T. P. Sparks (Maulmain, 1851), and again by Chr. J. Bandow (Rangoon, 1881)—a youth is changed into a small parrot by a magic thread being tied round his neck, and in that form is captured by some bird-catchers in the king’s garden, and presented as a pet to the princess, who discovers and removes the thread, when he becomes once more a handsome young man. Early every morning the princess replaces the thread and he is again changed to a parrot; at night she takes off the thread; and thus she continues to amuse herself until the consequences could not be any longer concealed, but in the sequel the youth is publicly acknowledged as her husband.
Sometimes the hero of a popular fiction has the power of transforming himself into a bird or of quitting his own body and animating that of any dead animal, as in Mr. Natésa Sástrí’s Dravidian Nights Entertainments, pp. 8-18, and the idea is also known to European ballads and romances. For instance, in Prior’s Danish Ballads, iii, 206, we are told how a knight, to gain access to a lady’s bower, becomes a bird and flies in. In his notes, Prior refers to the ballad of ‘The Earl of Mar’s Daughter’ (Buchan, i, 49):
“I am a doo the live-lang day,
A sprightly youth at night;
This aye gars me appear mair fair