Punker, a warlock of Rorbach (a town not far from Heidelberg), had obtained from the devil, as the regular recompense for his having thrice pierced the crucifix, the power of making three unerring shots daily, and had so been able to pick off in detail all but one of the garrison of a besieged town. To put his skill to proof, a certain nobleman ordered him to shoot a piece of money from his own son’s head. Punker wished to be excused, for he feared that the devil might play him false; but being induced to make the trial, knocked the coin from the boy’s cap, doing him no damage. Before shooting, he had stuck another arrow into his collar, and asked why, replied that if the devil had betrayed him, and he had killed the child, he would have sent the other bolt through the body of the person who had obliged him to undertake the performance. Malleus Maleficarum, Pars II, Quæstio I, c. xvi.[[14]] The date of the transaction is put at about 1420.
The last three forms of this tradition have the unimportant variations of brother and brother, or uncle and nephew, for father and son, and of nut, chessman, or coin for apple.
The story is German-Scandinavian, and not remarkably extended.[[15]] The seven versions agree in two points: the shot is compulsory; the archer meditates revenge in case he harms the person on whose head the mark is placed.[[16]] These features are wanting in the English ballad. William of Cloudesly offers of his own free motion to shoot an apple from his son’s head, and this after the king had declared him the best archer he had ever seen, for splitting a hazel-rod at twenty score paces; so that the act was done purely for glory. To be sure, the king threatens him with death if he does not achieve what he has undertaken, as death is also threatened in four of the seven German-Scandinavian stories for refusal to try the shot or for missing; but the threats in sts 154 f of the English ballad are a revival of the vow in sts 119 f. Justice has been balked by the unconditional boon granted the queen; aggravating and exasperating circumstances have come to light since this unadvised grace was conceded, and a hope is presented for a pretext under which the king may still hang the outlaws, all three. The shooting of the apple from the boy’s head, isolated from any particular connection, is perhaps all of the German-Scandinavian story that was known to the English ballad-maker, and all minor resemblances may well be fortuitous.[[17]]
If the shooting of an apple by somebody from somebody’s head is to be regarded as the kernel of the story, its area may then be considerably extended.
Castrén heard the following story among the Finns in Russian Karelia. Robbers had carried a man off over a lake. The son of the captive, a boy of twelve, followed along the other side of the lake, threatening to shoot them if they did not let his father go. These threats, for a time, only procured worse treatment for the prisoner; but at last the boy was told that his father should be released if he could shoot an arrow across the water and split an apple laid on his father’s head. This the boy did, and his father was liberated. Castrén’s Reiseerinnerungen aus den Jahren 1838–44, ed. Schiefner, p. 89 f.
A Persian poet introduces into a work composed about 1175 this anecdote.[[18]] A distinguished king was very fond of a beautiful slave, so much so that he was never easy unless he was in some way engaged with him. When the king amused himself with shooting, this slave would tremble with fear, for the king would make his mark of an apple placed on his favorite’s head, split the apple, and in so doing make the slave sick with alarm.
J. Grimm had seen a manuscript of travels in Turkey, in the Cassel library, with a picture of an archer aiming at an apple on a child’s head. Deutsche Mythologie, I, 317, note, ed. 1875.
With regard to the Persian story, Benfey observes that it must be admitted as possible that the shooting of an apple from the head of a beloved person may have been pitched upon in various localities, independently, as the mark of supreme skill in archery, but that this is not likely, and that the history of tradition requires us rather to presume that the conception was original in one instance only, and borrowed in the remainder; in which case the borrowing would be by the West from the East, and not the other way. We can come to no decision, however, he adds, until the source of the Persian story, or some older form of it, shall have been discovered. (Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen, 1861, p. 680.) The cautiousness of the imperial scholar is worthy of all imitation. The Persian saga, as it is sometimes called, is, in the perhaps mutilated form in which we have it, an inconsistent and inept anecdote; the German-Scandinavian saga is a complete and rational story. In this story it is fundamental that the archer executes a successful shot under circumstances highly agitating to the nerves; he risks the life of a beloved object, and in the majority of versions his own life is at stake besides. That the act must be done under compulsion is the simplest corollary. If the archer is cool enough to volunteer the shot, then the chief difficulty in making it is removed. This is a fault in the English ballad, where the father is unconcerned, and all the feeling is shown by the spectators. Cloudesly had already split a hazel-rod at twenty score paces; what was it for him to hit an apple at six score?[[19]]
But we are still far from covering the range of stories which have been treated as having some significant relation to that of Egil. Any shot at an apple, any shot at an object on a child’s person (provided the case be not a fact and recent), has been thought worth quoting, as a probable sprout from the same root. For examples: In an Esthonian popular tale, one Sharpeye hits an apple which a man a long way off is holding by his mouth. In a Servian poem, the hero, Milosch, sends an arrow through a ring, and hits a golden apple on the point of a lance. Bellerophon’s sons, Hippolochus and Isandrus, disputing which should be king of the Lycians, it was proposed that the question should be settled by seeing which could shoot through a ring placed on the breast of a child lying on his back. Laodamia, sister of the competitors, offered her son Sarpedon for the trial, and the uncles, to show their appreciation of such handsome behavior, resigned their claims in favor of Sarpedon. The shot, we may understand, did not come off.[[20]]
With regard to all this series of stories, and others which have been advanced as allied, more will be required to make out a substantial relationship than their having in common a shot at some object in contiguity with a living human body, be the object an apple, or whatever else. The idea of thus enhancing the merit or interest of a shot is not so ingenious that one instance must be held to be original, and all others derivative. The archer Alcon, according to Servius,[[21]] was wont to shoot through rings placed on men’s heads. Sir John Malcolm (Kaye’s Life, II, 400) was told that at Mocha, when the dates were ripe, a stone, standing up some three inches, would be put on the head of a child, at which two or three of the best marksmen would fire, with ball, at thirty-one yards distance. A case was reported, about fifty years ago, of a man in Pennsylvania shooting a very small apple from the head of another man.[[22]] A linen-weaver was judicially punished at Spires, some thirty years ago, for shooting a sheet of paper from his son’s hand, and afterwards a potato (“also einen Erdapfel,” Rochholz!) from the boy’s head.[[23]] The keel-boat men of the Mississippi, in their playfulness, would cut the pipe out of a companion’s hat-band at a long distance. “If they quarreled among themselves, and then made friends, their test that they bore no malice was to shoot some small object from each other’s heads,” such as an apple. Such feats have of late been common on the American stage.