[67] A kind of witch’s broomstick, apparently. It is to be regretted that our author (or the holy hermit) did not specify the other properties of this wonderful staff! Doubtless it also provided the possessor with “meat, drink, and clothing,” in common with similar magical articles which figure in the fairy tales of all peoples.
[68] Muslims have derived from the Jewish cabbalists the notion of the marvellous efficacy of the “unutterable Name” of God—called by the Arabs El-Ism el-Aazam, “the Most Great Name.” It was, they say, engraved on Solomon’s signet-ring, by means of which he subdued all the genii and demons, save one rebellious and powerful genie called Sakhr, who concealed himself in an island in mid-ocean. But the Wise King “took up” with strange women—with the daughters of idolatrous kings whom he had conquered in battle; and to one of those he gave his ring one unlucky day, to keep for him while he was at his bath. The demon Sakhr, who had been prowling invisibly about the palace, in hopes of catching his royal enemy at an unguarded moment, assumed Solomon’s form and readily obtained possession of the wonder-working ring, and sat on the throne of Israel, while Solomon—whose appearance was at once changed—was driven forth, to wander up and down the land as a beggar. To be brief, the ring was, after long years, found in the maw of a fish—Sakhr having thrown it away when he fled, on being detected as an imposter by the reading of the Law in his presence—and Solomon “came to his own again.” Solomon’s signet-ring figures frequently in Muslim romances and stories: it was with this magical ring that he sealed the copper vessels into which he conjured certain rebellious genii, and then caused them to be thrown into the sea; it also gave him power over all creatures on the earth and in the waters, and over the eight winds, which, at his command, wafted through the air, whithersoever he pleased, himself and his army on the marvellous carpet woven for him by genii—to which the poet Bahá-ed-Dín Zuhayr, of Egypt, thus alludes in an address to his lady-love:
“And now I bid the very wind
To speed my loving message on,
As though I might its fury bind,
Like Solomon.”
The wind is a common messenger of love in the amatory poetry of the East;—thus a pre-Islamite Arabian poet exclaims in apostrophising his beloved: “O may the western breeze tell thee of my ardent desire to return home!”
[69] I reproduce the following notes on treasure-trees from my paper on the Franklin’s Tale (entitled “The Damsel’s Rash Promise”) in Originals and Analogues of some of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” printed for the Chaucer Society, p. 336:
In the Kathá Sarit Ságara—an ancient Sanskrit story-book—we read of trees with golden trunks, branches of jewels, the clear white flowers of which were clusters of pearls; golden lotuses, etc. Aladdin, it will be remembered, found in the cave, where was deposited the magic lamp, trees bearing “fruit” of emeralds and other gems of great price, with which he took care to stuff his pockets.
In the mediæval romance of Alexander we are told how the world-conqueror jousted with Porus for his kingdom, and having overthrown him, he found in the palace of the vanquished monarch innumerable treasures, and amongst others a vine of which the branches were gold, the leaves emerald, and the fruit of other precious stones—a fiction, says Dunlop, which seems to have been suggested by the golden vine which Pompey carried away from Jerusalem.