In Gaelic, we meet more frequently the cloak of darkness, a cloak of effacement. In this tale we have a cloak or mantle of power, one that makes the wearer the finest person in the world. This is like the mantle of the prophet, which, if it falls on a successor to the office, gives him power equal to that of his predecessor. Of a similar character is the garment of the Wet Mantle Hero, in Cahal, son of King Conor, whose power is in his mantle, which is rain itself.
In a certain Indian tale, two skins are described,—one the skin of a black rain cloud, the other the skin of a gray snow cloud; whenever rain is wanted, the black skin is shaken out in the air, when snow is desired, the gray one is shaken. This shaking is done by two deities in the sky (stones at present), who thus produce rain and snow ad libitum. The mantles of power were skins originally. When people had forgotten the special virtue of the skins, and mantles were of cloth or skin indifferently, or later on of cloth exclusively, the virtue connected with mantles by tradition remained to them without reference to material.
In Hungarian tales the food of the steed, very often a mare, is glowing coals. There are Hungarian tales in which little if any doubt is left that the steed is lightning. It was a steed of this character that carried Cahal, son of King Conor, to Striker’s castle, a place to which no ship could go.
The skin of the white mare is like the skin of Klakherrit or Pitis in the Indian tale. When the young woman puts on the skin, she becomes the white mare; when she takes it off, she is herself again.
The Cotter’s Son and the Half Slim Champion.
Instead of a king’s son, the more usual substitute for an earlier hero, we have in this tale a cotter’s son. The scene of shaking ashes from his person by a mourner who has sat by the fire for a long time, finds a parallel in Indian stories. The Gaelic heroes, however, manage to get vastly more ashes onto themselves than the Indians. The son of the King of Lochlin in this case shakes off seven tons. In one Irish tale that I know, the hero goes out into the field after mourning long at the hearth, and shakes from his person an amount of ashes that covers seven acres in front of him, seven acres behind him, seven acres on his right hand, and seven acres on his left.
The old King of Lochlin, who has the same kind of story to tell as Balor, is a tremendously stubborn old fellow; there is a savage cruelty in the torture which his son inflicts on him that is without parallel, even in myth tales. The old man goes through the roasting with a strength which no stoic or martyr could equal. When he yields at last, he does so serenely, and tells a tale which solves the conundrum completely.
Fin MacCool, the three Giants, and the Small Men.
The theft of the children of the King of the Big Men has an interesting parallel in an Indian tale from California, a part of which is as follows:—