[45]. Revenge, amongst the Arabs, is a sacred duty; and, in their state of civilization, society could not be kept together without it. So the slaughter of a villain is held to be a sacrifice to Allah, who amongst Christians claims for Himself the monopoly of vengeance.
[46]. Arab. “Zindík.” See vol. v. [230].
[47]. Lane translates this “put for him the remaining food and water:” but Al-Ákhar (Mac. Edit.) evidently refers to the Najíb (dromedary).
[48]. We can hardly see the heroism of the deed, but it must be remembered that Bahram was a wicked sorcerer, whom it was every good Moslem’s bounden duty to slay. Compare the treatment of witches in England two centuries ago.
[49]. The mother, in Arab tales, is ma mère, now becoming somewhat ridiculous in France on account of the over use of that venerable personage.
[50]. The forbidden closet occurs also in Sayf Zú al-Yazan, who enters it and finds the bird-girls. Trébutien ii, 208 says, “Il est assez remarquable qu’il existe en Allemagne une tradition à peu près semblable, et qui a fourni le sujet d’un des contes de Musaeus, entitulé le voile enlevé.” Here Hasan is artfully left alone in a large palace without other companions but his thoughts and the reader is left to divine the train of ideas which drove him to open the door.
[51]. Arab. “Buhayrah” (Bresl. Edit. “Bahrah”), the tank or cistern in the Hosh (= court-yard) of an Eastern house. Here, however, it is a rain-cistern on the flat roof of the palace (See Night dcccviii).
[52]. This description of the view is one of the most gorgeous in The Nights.
[53]. Here again are the “Swan-maidens” (See vol. v. [346]) “one of the primitive myths, the common heritage of the whole Aryan (Iranian) race.” In Persia Bahram-i-Gúr when carried off by the Dív Sapíd seizes the Peri’s dove-coat: in Santháli folk-lore Torica, the Goatherd, steals the garment doffed by one of the daughters of the sun; and hence the twelve birds of Russian Story. To the same cycle belong the Seal-tales of the Faroe Islands (Thorpe’s Northern Mythology) and the wise women or mermaids of Shetland (Hibbert). Wayland the smith captures a wife by seizing a mermaid’s raiment and so did Sir Hagán by annexing the wardrobe of a Danubian water-nymph. Lettsom, the translator, mixes up this swan-raiment with that of the Valkyries or Choosers of the Slain. In real life stealing women’s clothes is an old trick and has often induced them, after having been seen naked, to offer their persons spontaneously. Of this I knew two cases in India, where the theft is justified by divine example. The blue god Krishna, a barbarous and grotesque Hindu Apollo, robbed the raiment of the pretty Gopálís (cowherdesses) who were bathing in the Arjun River and carried them to the top of a Kunduna tree; nor would he restore them till he had reviewed the naked girls and taken one of them to wife. See also Imr al-Kays (of the Mu’allakah) with “Onaiza” at the port of Daratjuljul (Clouston’s Arabian Poetry, p. 4). A critic has complained of my tracing the origin of the Swan-maiden legend to the physical resemblance between the bird and a high-bred girl (vol. v. [346]). I should have explained my theory which is shortly, that we must seek a material basis for all so-called supernaturalisms, and that anthropomorphism satisfactorily explains the Swan-maiden, as it does the angel and the devil. There is much to say on the subject; but this is not the place for long discussion.
[54]. Arab. “Nafs Ammárah,” corresponding with our canting term “The Flesh.” Nafs al-Nátíkah is the intellectual soul or function; Nafs al-Ghazabíyah = the animal function and Nafs al Shahwániyah = the vegetative property.