When they heard this, they said: ‘Nothing else will do but we must shoot him.’ So they drew up the soldiers, and said they would hold a review in his honour, for they would celebrate the wedding in the square before the castle. Then they conducted him thither, and the soldiers were already going to let fly at him. But George said to the man who held his thumb in the bottle in place of a stopper: ‘You said, if you pulled your thumb out, you could besprinkle everything. Pull it out—quick!’ ‘Oh, sir, I’ll easily perform that.’ So he pulled out his thumb and gave them all such a sprinkling, that they were all blind, and not one could see.
So, when they perceived that nothing else was to be done, they told him to go, for they would give him the damsel. Then they gave him a handsome royal robe, and the wedding took place. I, too, was at the wedding; they had music there, sang, ate, and drank; there was meat, there were cheesecakes, and baskets full of everything, and buckets full of strong waters. To-day I went, yesterday I came; I found an egg among the tree-stumps; I knocked it against somebody’s head, and gave him a bald place, and he’s got it still.
This story is related to Grimm’s tale of the ‘Golden Goose,’ but it is much more rationally constructed, and much more interesting. The man who jumps one hundred miles appears to be the rainbow, the man with bandaged eyes the lightning, and the man with the bottle the cloud. The interpretation will be very similar to that of [No. 1], but the allegory is by no means so clear or so well constructed. As to the nonsense at the end, it is a specimen of the manner in which the narrators of stories frequently finish them in all Slavonic languages.
MORAVIAN STORIES.
MORAVIA is so named from the river Morava (in German the river March), of which, and its affluents, it is the basin. It falls into the Danube a little above Presburg. In very early times Moravia appears to have been more civilized and powerful than Bohemia; but later, Bohemia became a considerable kingdom, and Moravia a dependency of, and eventually a margravate under the Bohemian crown.
The Moravian stories differ but little in character from those of Bohemia. The country, unlike Bohemia, abounds in dialects, although the literary language is the Bohemian. On the east the Moravian melts into the Silesian, or ‘Water-Polish.’
[No. 8], ‘Godmother Death,’ is an interesting variant of the Teutonic ‘Godfather Death,’ which is given by Grimm. The reason why Death is represented as a Godmother, rather than a Godfather, in the Moravian story, is, that Death (Smrt) is feminine in all Slavonic dialects. The story constructed on this basis is more graceful and fuller of incident than the Teutonic tale, in which Death is masculine.
[No. 9] is another story falling under the head of ‘Natural Science in Allegory,’ which is clearer and simpler in construction and interpretation than any variant of it that I am acquainted with.