“There’s for you, father!” went on the old woman, “there’s for me.”
“And none for me!” [repeated the boy.]
“Why, old man,” said the wife, “go and see whatever that is up there.”
The father climbed into the upper room and there he found Ivashko. The old people were delighted, and asked their boy about everything that had happened. And after that he and they lived on happily together.
[That part of this story which relates to the baking and eating of the witch’s daughter is well known in many lands. It is found in the German “Hänsel und Grethel” (Grimm. KM. No. 15, and iii. p. 25, where a number of parallels are mentioned); in the Norse “Askelad” (Asbjörnsen and Moe, No. 1. Dasent, “Boots and the Troll,” No. 32), where a Troll’s daughter is baked; and “Smörbuk” (Asb. and Moe, No. 52. Dasent, “Buttercup,” No. 18), in which the victim is daughter of a “Haugkjœrring,” another name for a Troll-wife; in the Servian story of “The Stepmother,” &c. (Vuk Karajich, No. 35, pp. 174-5) in which two Chivuti, or Jews, are tricked into eating their baked mother; in the Modern Greek stories (Hahn, No. 3 and ii. p. 181), in which the hero bakes (1) a Drakäna, while her husband, the Drakos, is at church, (2) a Lamiopula, during the absence of the Lamia, her mother; and in the Albanian story of “Augenhündin” (Hahn, No. 95), in which the heroine gets rid in a similar manner of Maro, the daughter of that four eyed συκιένεζα. (See note, ii, 309.) Afanasief also refers (i. p. 121) to Haltrich, No. 37, and Haupt and Schmaler, ii. pp. 172-4. He also mentions a similar tale about a giantess existing among the Baltic Kashoubes. See also the end of the song of Tardanak, showing how he killed “the Seven Headed Jelbegen,” Radloff, i. p. 31.]
A variant of this story (from the Chernigof Government)[211] begins by telling how two old people were childless for a long time. At last the husband went into the forest, felled wood, and made a cradle. Into this his wife laid one of the logs he had cut, and began swinging it, crooning the while a rune beginning
Swing, blockie dear, swing.
After a little time “behold! the block already had legs. The old woman rejoiced greatly and began singing anew, and went on singing until the block became a babe.” In this variant the boy rows a silver boat with a golden oar; in another South Russian variant[212] the boat is golden, the oar of silver. In a White-Russian variant quoted by Afanasief (i. p. 118), the place of the witch’s daughter is filled by her son, who had been in the habit of alluring to her den by gifts of toys, and there devouring, the children from the adjacent villages. Buslaef’s “Historical Essays,” (i. pp. 313-321) contain a valuable investigation of Kulish’s version of this story, which he compares with the romance of “The Knight of the Swan.”
In another of the variants of this story[213] Ivanushka is the son of a Baruinya or Lady, and he is carried off in a whirlwind by a Baba Yaga. His three sisters go to look for him, and each of them in turn finds out where he is and attempts to carry him off, after sending the Baba Yaga to sleep and smearing her eyelids with pitch. But the two elder sisters are caught on their way home by the Baba Yaga, and terribly scratched and torn. The youngest sister, however, succeeds in rescuing her brother, having taken the precaution of propitiating with butter the cat Jeremiah, “who was telling the boy stories and singing him songs.” When the Baba Yaga awakes, she tells Jeremiah to scratch her eyes open, but he refuses, reminding her that, long as he has lived under her roof, she has never in any way regaled him, whereas the “fair maiden” had no sooner arrived than she treated him to butter. In another variant[214] the bereaved mother sends three servant-maids in search of her boy. Two of them get torn to pieces; the third succeeds in saving Ivanushka from the Baba Yaga, who is so vexed that she pinches her butter-bribed cat to death for not having awakened her when the rescue took place. A comparison of these three stories is sufficient to show how closely connected are the Witch and the Baba Yaga, how readily the name of either of the two may be transferred to the other.
But there is one class of stories in which the Vyed’ma is represented as differing from the Baba Yaga, in so far as she is the offspring of parents who are not in any way supernatural or inhuman. Without any apparent cause for her abnormal conduct, the daughter of an ordinary royal house will suddenly begin to destroy and devour all living things which fall in her way—her strength developing as rapidly as her appetite. Of such a nature—to be accounted for only on the supposition that an evil spirit has taken up its abode in a human body[215]—is the witch who appears in the somewhat incomprehensible story that follows.