“Ah, Prince Ivan! why, we never expected to see you again. Well, it wasn’t for nothing that you gave yourself so much trouble. Such a beauty as Marya Morevna one might search for all the world over—and never find one like her!”
And so they visited, and they feasted; and afterwards they went off to their own realm.[104]
With the Baba Yaga, the feminine counterpart of Koshchei and the Snake, we shall deal presently, and the Waters of Life and Death will find special notice elsewhere.[105] A magic water, which brings back the dead to life, plays a prominent part in the folk-lore of all lands, but the two waters, each performing one part only of the cure, render very noteworthy the Slavonic stories in which they occur. The Princess, Marya Morevna, who slaughters whole armies before she is married, and then becomes mild and gentle, belongs to a class of heroines who frequently occur both in the stories and in the “metrical romances,” and to whom may be applied the remarks made by Kemble with reference to a similar Amazon.[106] In one of the variants of the story the representative of Marya Morevna fights the hero before she marries him.[107] The Bluebeard incident of the forbidden closet is one which often occurs in the Skazkas, as we shall see further on; and the same may be said about the gratitude of the Bird, Bee, and Lioness.
The story of Immortal Koshchei is one of very frequent occurrence, the different versions maintaining a unity of idea, but varying considerably in detail. In one of them,[108] in which Koshchei’s part is played by a Snake, the hero’s sisters are carried off by their feathered admirers without his leave being asked—an omission for which a full apology is afterwards made; in another, the history of “Fedor Tugarin and Anastasia the Fair,”[109] the hero’s three sisters are wooed and won, not by the Falcon, the Eagle, and the Raven, but by the Wind, the Hail, and the Thunder. He himself marries the terrible heroine Anastasia the Fair, in the forbidden chamber of whose palace he finds a snake “hung up by one of its ribs.” He gives it a lift and it gets free from its hook and flies away, carrying off Anastasia the Fair. Fedor eventually finds her, escapes with her on a magic foal which he obtains, thanks to the aid of grateful wolves, bees, and crayfish, and destroys the snake by striking it “on the forehead” with the stone which was destined to be its death. In a third version of the story,[110] the hero finds in the forbidden chamber “Koshchei the Deathless, in a cauldron amid flames, boiling in pitch.” There he has been, he declares, for fifteen years, having been lured there by the beauty of Anastasia the Fair. In a fourth,[111] in which the hero’s three sisters marry three beggars, who turn out to be snakes with twenty, thirty, and forty heads apiece, Koshchei is found in the forbidden chamber, seated on a horse which is chained to a cauldron. He begs the hero to unloose the horse, promising, in return, to save him from three deaths.
[Into the mystery of the forbidden chamber I will not enter fully at present. Suffice to say that there can be little doubt as to its being the same as that in which Bluebeard kept the corpses of his dead wives. In the Russian, as well as in the Oriental stories, it is generally the curiosity of a man, not of a woman, which leads to the opening of the prohibited room. In the West of Europe the fatal inquisitiveness is more frequently ascribed to a woman. For parallels see the German stories of “Marienkind,” and “Fitchers Vogel.” (Grimm, KM., Nos. 3 and 46, also the notes in Bd. iii. pp. 8, 76, 324.) Less familiar than these is, probably, the story of “Die eisernen Stiefel” (Wolf’s “Deutsche Hausmärchen,” 1851, No. 19), in which the hero opens a forbidden door—that of a summer-house—and sees “deep down below him the earth, and on the earth his father’s palace,” and is seized by a sudden longing after his former home. The Wallachian story of “The Immured Mother” (Schott, No. 2) resembles Grimm’s “Marienkind” in many points. But its forbidden chamber differs from that of the German tale. In the latter the rash intruder sees “die Dreieinigkeit im Feuer und Glanz sitzen;” in the former, “the Holy Mother of God healing the wounds of her Son, the Lord Christ.” In the Neapolitan story of “Le tre Corune” (Pentamerone, No. 36), the forbidden chamber contains “three maidens, clothed all in gold, sitting and seeming to slumber upon as many thrones” (Liebrecht’s translation, ii. 76). The Esthonian tale of the “Wife-murderer” (Löwe’s “Ehstnische Märchen,” No. 20) is remarkably—not to say suspiciously—like that French story of Blue Beard which has so often made our young blood run cold. Sister Anne is represented, and so are the rescuing brothers, the latter in the person of the heroine’s old friend and playmate, Tönnis the goose-herd. Several very curious Gaelic versions of the story are given by Mr. Campbell (“Tales of the West Highlands,” No. 41, ii. 265-275). Two of the three daughters of a poor widow look into a forbidden chamber, find it “full of dead gentlewomen,” get stained knee-deep in blood, and refuse to give a drop of milk to a cat which offers its services. So their heads are chopped off. The third daughter makes friends with the cat, which licks off the tell-tale blood, so she escapes detection. In a Greek story (Hahn, ii. p. 197) the hero discovers in the one-and-fortieth room of a castle belonging to a Drakos, who had given him leave to enter forty only, a magic horse, and before the door of the room he finds a pool of gold in which he becomes gilded. In another (Hahn, No. 15) a prince finds in the forbidden fortieth a lake in which fairies of the swan-maiden species are bathing. In a third (No. 45) the fortieth room contains a golden horse and a golden dog which assist their bold releaser. In a fourth (No. 68) it imprisons “a fair maiden, shining like the sun,” whom the demon proprietor of the castle has hung up within it by her hair.
As usual, all these stories are hard to understand. But one of the most important of their Oriental equivalents is perfectly intelligible. When Saktideva, in the fifth book of the “Kathásaritságara,” comes after long travel to the Golden City, and is welcomed as her destined husband by its princess, she warns him not to ascend the central terrace of her palace. Of course he does so, and finds three chambers, in each of which lies the lifeless form of a fair maiden. After gazing at these seeming corpses, in one of which he recognizes his first love, he approaches a horse which is grazing beside a lake. The horse kicks him into the water; he sinks deep—and comes up again in his native land. The whole of the story is, towards its termination, fully explained by one of its principal characters—one of the four maidens whom Saktideva simultaneously marries. With the version of this romance in the “Arabian Nights” (“History of the Third Royal Mendicant,” Lane, i. 160-173), everyone is doubtless acquainted. A less familiar story is that of Kandarpaketu, in the second book of the “Hitopadesa,” who lives happily for a time as the husband of the beautiful semi-divine queen of the Golden City. At last, contrary to her express commands, he ventures to touch a picture of a Vidyádharí. In an instant the pictured demigoddess gives him a kick which sends him flying back into his own country.
For an explanation of the myth which lies at the root of all these stories, see Cox’s “Mythology of the Aryan Nations,” ii. 36, 330. See also Professor de Gubernatis’s “Zoological Mythology,” i. 168.]
We will now take one of those versions of the story which describe how Koshchei’s death is brought about by the destruction of that extraneous object on which his existence depends. The incident is one which occupies a prominent place in the stories of this class current in all parts of Europe and Asia, and its result is almost always the same. But the means by which that result is brought about differ considerably in different lands. In the Russian tales the “death” of the Evil Being with whom the hero contends—the substance, namely, the destruction of which involves his death—is usually the last of a sequence of objects either identical with, or closely resembling, those mentioned in the following story of—
Koshchei the Deathless.[112]
In a certain country there once lived a king, and he had three sons, all of them grown up. All of a sudden Koshchei the Deathless carried off their mother. Then the eldest son craved his father’s blessing, that he might go and look for his mother. His father gave him his blessing, and he went off and disappeared, leaving no trace behind. The second son waited and waited, then he too obtained his father’s blessing—and he also disappeared. Then the youngest son, Prince Ivan, said to his father, “Father, give me your blessing, and let me go and look for my mother.”