[With this story may be compared a multitude of tales in very many languages. In German for instance, “Der König vom goldenen Berg,” (Grimm, KM. No. 92. See also Nos. 51, 56, 113, 181, and the opening of No. 31), “Der Königssohn und die Teufelstochter,” (Haltrich, No. 26), and “Grünus Kravalle” (Wolf’s “Deutsche Hausmärchen,” No. 29)—the Norse “Mastermaid,” (Asbjörnsen and Moe, No. 46, Dasent, No. 11) and “The Three Princesses of Whiteland,” (A. and M. No. 9, Dasent, No. 26)—the Lithuanian story (Schleicher, No. 26, p. 75) in which a “field-devil” exacts from a farmer the promise of a child—the Wallachian stories (Schott, Nos. 2 and 15) in which a devil obtains a like promise from a woodcutter and a fisherman—the Modern Greek (Hahn, Nos. 4, 5, 54, and 68) in which a child is promised to a Dervish, a Drakos, the Devil, and a Demon—and the Gaelic tales of “The Battle of the Birds” and “The Sea-maiden,” (Campbell, Nos. 2 and 4) in the former of which the child is promised to a Giant, in the latter to a Mermaid. The likeness between the Russian story and the “Battle of the Birds” is very striking. References to a great many other similar tales will be found in Grimm (KM. iii. pp. 96-7, and 168-9). The group to which all these stories belong is linked with a set of tales about a father who apprentices his son to a wizard, sometimes to the Devil, from whom the youth escapes with great difficulty. The principal Russian representative of the second set is called “Eerie Art,” “Khitraya Nauka,” (Afanasief, v. No. 22, vi. No. 45, viii. p. 339).
To the hero’s adventures while with the Water King, and while escaping from him, an important parallel is offered by the end of the already mentioned (at p. 92) Indian story of Sringabhuja. That prince asks Agnisikha, the Rákshasa whom, in his crane-form, he has wounded, to bestow upon him the hand of his daughter—the maiden who had met him on his arrival at the Rákshasa’s palace. The demon pretends to consent, but only on condition that the prince is able to pick out his love from among her numerous sisters. This Sringabhuja is able to do in spite of all the demon’s daughters being exactly alike, as she has told him beforehand she will wear her pearls on her brow instead of round her neck. Her father will not remark the change, she says, for being of the demon race, he is not very sharp witted. The Rákshasa next sets the prince two of the usual tasks. He is to plough a great field, and sow a hundred bushels of corn. When this, by the daughter’s help, is done, he is told to gather up the seed again. This also the demon’s daughter does for him, sending to his aid a countless swarm of ants. Lastly he is commanded to visit the demon’s brother and invite him to the wedding. He does so, and is pursued by the invited guest, from whom he escapes only by throwing behind him earth, water, thorns, and lastly fire, with all of which he has been provided by his love. They produce corresponding obstacles which enable him to get away from the uncle of his bride. The demon now believes that his proposed son-in-law must be a god in disguise, so he gives his consent to the marriage. All goes well for a time, but at last the prince wants to go home, so he and his wife fly from her father’s palace. Agnisikha pursues them. She makes her husband invisible, while she assumes the form of a woodman. Up comes her angry sire, and asks for news of the fugitives. She replies she has seen none, her eyes being full of tears caused by the death of the Rákshasa prince Agnisikha. The slow-witted demon immediately flies home to find out whether he is really dead. Discovering that he is not, he renews the pursuit. Again his daughter renders her husband invisible, and assumes the form of a messenger carrying a letter. When her father arrives and repeats his question, she says she has seen no one: she is going with a letter to his brother from Agnisikha, who has just been mortally wounded. Back again home flies the demon in great distress, anxious to find out whether he has really been wounded to death or not. After settling this question, he leaves his daughter and her husband in peace. See Professor Brockhaus in the “Berichte der phil. hist. Classe der K. Sächs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften,” 1861, pp. 226-9, and Professor Wilson, “Essays, &c.,” ii. p. 136-8. Cf. R. Köhler in “Orient und Occident,” ii. pp. 107-14.]
In another story a king is out hunting and becomes thirsty. Seeing a spring near at hand, he bends down and is just going to lap up its water, when the Tsar-Medvéd, a King-Bear, seizes him by the beard. The king is unable to free himself from his grasp, and is obliged to promise as his ransom “that which he knows not of at home,” which turns out to be a couple of children—a boy and a girl—who have been born during his absence. In vain does he attempt to save the twins from their impending fate, by concealing them in a secret abode constructed for that purpose underground. In the course of time the King-Bear arrives to claim them, finds out their hiding-place, digs them up, and carries them off on his back to a distant region where no man lives. During his absence they attempt to escape being carried through the air on the back of a friendly falcon, but the King-Bear sees them, “strikes his head against the earth, and burns the falcon’s wings.” The twins fall to the ground, and are carried by the King-Bear to his home amid inaccessible mountains. There they make a second attempt at escape, trusting this time to an eagle’s aid; but it meets with exactly the same fate as their first trial. At last they are rescued by a bull-calf, which succeeds in baffling all the King-Bear’s efforts to recover them. At the end of their perilous journey the bull-calf tells the young prince to cut its throat, and burn its carcase. He unwillingly consents, and from its ashes spring a horse, a dog, and an apple-tree, all of which play important parts in the next act of the drama.[148]
In one of the variants of the Water King story,[149] the seizer of the drinking kings’ beard is not called the Morskoi Tsar but Chudo Morskoe, a Water Chudo, whose name recalls to mind the Chudo Yudo we have already met with.[150] The Prince who is obliged, in consequence of his father’s promise, to surrender himself to the Water Giant, falls in love with a maiden whom he finds in that potentate’s palace, and who is an enchantress whom the Chudo has stolen. She turns herself into a ring, which he carries about with him, and eventually, after his escape from the Chudo, she becomes his bride.
In another story,[151] the being who obtains a child from one of the incautious fathers of the Jephthah type who abound in popular fiction, is of a very singular nature. A merchant is flying across a river on the back of an eagle, when he drops a magic “snuff-box,” which had been entrusted to his charge by that bird, and it disappears beneath the waters. At the eagle’s command, the crayfish search for it, and bring back word that it is lying “on the knees of an Idol.” The eagle summons the Idol, and demands the snuff box. Thereupon the Idol says to the merchant—“Give me what you do not know of at home?” The merchant agrees and the Idol gives him back his snuff-box.
In some of the variants of the story, the influence of ideas connected with Christianity makes itself apparent in the names given to the actors. Thus in the “Moujik and Anastasia Adovna,”[152] it is no longer a king of the waters, but a devil’s imp,[153] who bargains with the thirsting father for his child, and the swan-maiden whose shift the devoted youth steals bears the name of Adovna, the daughter of Ad or Hades. In “The Youth,”[154] a moujik, who has lost his way in a forest makes the rash promise to a man who enables him to cross a great river; “and that man (says the story) was a devil.”[155] We shall meet with other instances further on of parents whose “hasty words” condemn their children to captivity among evil spirits. In one of the stories of this class,[156] the father is a hunter who is perishing with cold one night, and who makes the usual promise as the condition of his being allowed to warm himself at a fire guarded by a devil. Being in consequence of this deprived of a son, he becomes very sad, and drinks himself to death. “The priest will not bury his sinful body, so it is thrust into a hole at a crossway,” and he falls into the power of “that very same devil,” who turns him into a horse, and uses him as a beast of burden. At last he is released by his son, who has forced the devil to free him after several adventures—one of them being a fight with the evil spirit in the shape of a three-headed snake.
In the Hindoo story of “Brave Seventee Bai,”[157] that heroine kills “a very large Cobra” which comes out of a lake. Touching the waters with a magic diamond taken from the snake, she sees them roll back “in a wall on either hand,” between which she passes into a splendid garden. In it she finds a lovely girl who proves to be the Cobra’s daughter and who is delighted to hear of her serpent-father’s death.
Demon haunted waters, which prove fatal to mortals who bathe in or drink of them, often occur in oriental fiction. In one of the Indian stories, for instance,[158] a king is induced to order his escort to bathe in a lake which is the abode of a Rákshasa or demon. They leap into the water simultaneously, and are all devoured by the terrible man-eater. From the assaults of such a Rákshasa as this it was that Buddha, who was at the time a monkey, preserved himself and 80,000 of his brother monkeys, by suggesting that they should drink from the tank in which the demon lay in wait for them, “through reeds previously made completely hollow by their breath.”[159]
From these male personifications of evil—from the Snake, Koshchei, and the Water King—we will now turn to their corresponding female forms. By far the most important beings of the latter class are those malevolent enchantresses who form two closely related branches of the same family. Like their sisters all over the world, they are, as a general rule, old, hideous, and hateful. They possess all kinds of supernatural powers, but their wits are often dull. They wage constant war with mankind, but the heroes of storyland find them as easily overcome as the males of their family. In their general character they bear a strong resemblance to the Giantesses, Lamias, female Trolls, Ogresses, Dragonesses, &c., of Europe, but in some of their traits they differ from those well-known beings, and therefore they are worthy of a detailed notice.