With variations of spelling not noted.
Scott (as above, except) 12, mickle land: land was perhaps the word which is blotted out in Sharpe.
31. women’s.
263. The New-Slain Knight.
P. 434 b. Translated also by Gerhard, p. 168.
VOL. V.
266. John Thomson and the Turk.
P. 3 b. There may be added another Little-Russian story communicated to me in translation by Professor Wollner: Ethnographic Survey, etc. (Etnografičeskoe Obozrěnie, etc.) Moscow, 1893, V, 104.
A tsar and a tsarina, when dying, charged their son Soliman not to marry a woman older than himself. This, however, he did, and his wife hated him, and one day, when he was hunting, went off to her brother, ordering the servants to say that she had died. This report the servants duly made, but Soliman knew that his wife had gone to her brother, and he felt the loss so much that he could not keep away from her. Meeting a boy in tattered clothes, he changed with him, gave the boy everything he had on except his ring, and put on rags, to play the beggar. He proceeded to the brother’s house, and seeing his wife sitting at a window, held out his hand, on which his ring was sparkling, and asked an alms. His wife knew him at once by the ring, and bade him come in. ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Once I was a tsar,’ he said, ‘but my wife died, and I became a beggar.’ At this point the brother arrived on the scene. The woman told Soliman to lie down on the threshold; he did so, and she sat down on him. When her brother came in she said, ‘Guess what I am sitting on.’ He answered, ‘On the threshold.’ ‘Wrong,’ said she; ‘on Tsar Soliman.’ ‘If it is he,’ said her brother, ‘I will cut his head off.’ But here Soliman suggested that if the brother should take his head off on the spot, nobody would know that he had killed a tsar; whereas if he would build a three-story gallows and hang Soliman on it, all the world would see that he had been the death of a tsar and not of a beggar. So a three-story gallows was built, and as they were taking Soliman up to the first stage, he said, Give me a horn, to cheer my heart for the last time. They gave him a horn and he began to blow, Quick, quick, dear soldiers, for my death and end is nigh. A black regiment set out for the place. Bystanders said, Tsar Soliman, you are up high and see far: what is the black thing coming along the hill? ‘My death, which gleams black in the distance.’ Soliman mounted to the second stage and blew his horn again: Quick, quick, dear soldiers, my death and end is nigh. He saw a white regiment coming. The people said, Tsar Soliman, you are high up and see far: what is that white thing which is coming? My death, which gleams white in the distance. Then Soliman mounted to the third stage and blew Quick, quick, dear soldiers, my death and end is nigh, and he saw a red regiment coming. The people asked, what red thing was coming. My death, which gleams red in the distance.[123] Then the black regiment came up, after it the white, and finally the red; they slew Soliman’s wife and her brother, took Soliman down from the gallows, and rode home.
8. Danish. Through the friendly help of Dr. Axel Olrik I am now in a position to say that there is one fundamental text A, in MSS of 1600 and 1615, from which all the others are derived. In the seventeenth century A was expanded from forty to eighty-two couplets. B, the original of the expanded copy, is found in a MS. of 1635; from B come the other five later MS. texts, the flying-sheet of 1719, Kristensen’s fragment, and some recent copies.