see it, orders coarse food to be offered it; treats his poor benefactor,
in short, with all the arrogant contempt of an ungrateful beggar
suddenly enriched. As the ill-used cat says in the _Pentamerone_--
De riche appauvri Dieu te gard'
Et de croquant passe richard!
Finally the gazelle dies of sorrow, and Sultan Darai dreams that he is
scratching on his old dustheap. He wakens and finds himself there, as
naked and wretched as ever, while his wife is wafted to her father's
house at home.
The moral is obvious, and the story is told in a very touching manner,
moreover all the world takes the side of the gazelle, and it is _mourned
with a public funeral_.
Here, then, in Zanzibar we have decidedly the most serious and
purposeful form of _Puss in Boots_. It is worth noting that the animal
hero is _not_ the Rabbit who is the usual hero in Zanzibar as he is in
Uncle Remus's tales. It is also worth noticing that a certain tribe of
Southern Arabians do, as a matter of fact, honour all dead gazelles with
seven days of public mourning. 'Ibn al-Moghawir,' says Prof.
Robertson-Smith, in _Kinship in Early Arabia_ (p. 195), 'speaks of a
South Arab tribe called Beni Harith or Acarib, among whom if a dead
gazelle was found, it was solemnly buried, and the whole tribe mourned
for it seven days.... The gazelle supplies a name to a clan of the Azd,
the Zabyan.' Prof. Robertson-Smith adds (p. 204), 'And so when we find a
whole clan mourning over a dead gazelle, we can hardly but conclude that
when this habit was first formed, they thought that they were of the
gazelle-stock' or Totem kindred.
It is quite possible that all these things are mere coincidences.
Certainly we shall not argue, because the most moral form of _Puss in
Boots_ gives us a gazelle in place of a cat, and because a certain Arab
clan mourns gazelles, while the gazelle hero is found in the story of a
half-Arab race, that, therefore, the Swahili gazelle story is the
original form of _Puss in Boots_, and that from Arabia the tale has been
carried into Russia, Scandinavia, Italy, India, and France, often
leaving its moral behind it, and always exchanging its gazelle for some
other beast-hero.
This kind of reasoning is only too common, when the object is to show
that India was the birthplace of any widely diffused popular fiction. In
India, people argue, this or that tale has a moral. Among Celts and
Kamschatkans it has _no_ moral. But certain stories did undeniably come
from India in literary works, like the stories of Sindibad. Therefore
this or that story also came from India, dropping its moral on the way.
Did we like this sort of syllogism, we might boldly assert that _Puss
in_ _Boots_ was originally a heroic myth of an Arab tribe with a gazelle
for Totem. But we like not this kind of syllogism. The purpose of this
study of _Puss in Boots_ is to show that, even when a tale has probably
been invented but once, in one place, and has thence spread over a great
part of the world, the difficulty of finding the original centre is
perhaps insuperable. At any time a fresh discovery may be made. Puss
_may_ turn up in some hitherto unread manuscript of an old missionary
among Mexicans or Peruvians[66].
[Footnote 52: George Cruikshank had also turned _Hop o' My Thumb_ and
_Cinderella_ into temperance tracts. See Cruikshank's _Fairy Library_,
G. Bell and Sons.]
[Footnote 53: The French version is in M. Charles Deulin's _Contes du
Roi Gambrinus_. The German (Grimm, 64) omits the story of the exchanges,
but ends like _Jean Gogue_. The Zulu is in Dr. Callaway's
_Inzinganekwane_, pp. 38-40.]
[Footnote 54: _Wide-awake Stories._ A collection of tales told by little
children, between sunset and sunrise, in the Punjaub and Kashmir. Steel
and Temple, London, 1884, p. 26.]
[Footnote 55: Andree, _Die Anthropophagie_, 'Ueberlebsel im
Volksglauben.' Leipzig, 1887.]
[Footnote 56: _Causeries du Lundi_, December 29, 1851.]
[Footnote 57: _Schol. ad. Theog._ 885.]
[Footnote 58: Thorpe's _Palace with Pillars of Gold_.]
[Footnote 59: Dasent's _Lord Peter_.]
[Footnote 60: _Piacevoli Notti_, xi. 1, Venice, 1562. Crane's _Italian
Popular Tales_, p. 348.]
[Footnote 61: Pitre, No. 188; Crane, p. 127. Gonzenbach, 65, _Conte
Piro_. In Gonzenbach, the man does not kill the fox, which pretends to
be dead, and is bilked of its promised reward, a grand funeral.]
[Footnote 62: Lou Compaire Gatet, 'Father Cat,' _Revue des Langues
Romanes_, iii. 396. See Deulin, _Contes de Ma Mere L'Oye_, p. 205.]
[Footnote 63: _Boukoutchi Khan_, translated into German by Schiefner.
_Memoires de l'Academie de St. Petersbourg_, 1873. With Dr. Koehler's
Notes.]
[Footnote 64: Gubernatis. _Zoological Mythology_, ii. 136. Quoting
Afanassieff, iv. 11. Compare a similar snake in Swahili.]
[Footnote 65: _Pantschatantra_, i. 222.]
[Footnote 66: The work of M. Cosquin's referred to throughout is his
valuable _Contes de Lorraine_, Paris, 1886. A crowd of _Puss in Boots_
stories are referred to by Dr. Koehler in Gonzenbach's _Sicilianische
Maerchen_, ii. 243 (Leipzig, 1870). They are Finnish, Bulgarian, Russian,
and South Siberian. The Swahili and Hindu versions appear to have been
unknown, in 1870, to Dr. Koehler. In 1883, Mr. Ralston, who takes the
Buddhist side, did not know the Indian version (_Nineteenth Century_,
Jan. 1883).]
LES FEES.
_Toads and Diamonds._
The origin of this little story is so manifestly moral, that there is
little need to discuss it. A good younger sister behaves kindly to a
poor old woman, who, being a fairy, turns all her words into flowers and
diamonds. The wicked elder sister treats the fairy with despite: _her_
words become toads and serpents, and the younger marries a king's son.
The preference shown to the youngest child is discussed in the note on
Cinderella. M. Deulin asks whether _Toads and Pearls_ is connected with
the legend of Latona (Leto) and the peasants whom she changed into
frogs, for refusing to allow her to drink[67]. Latona really wished to
bathe her children, and the two narratives have probably no connection,
though rudeness is punished in both. Nor is there a closer connection
with the tales in which tears (like the tears of Wainamoinen in the
_Kalewala_) change into pearls. It is an obvious criticism that the
elder girl should have met the fairy first; she was not likely to behave
so rudely when she knew that politeness would be rewarded. The natural
order of events occurs in Grimm's _Golden Goose_ (64), where the eldest
and the second son refuse to let the old man taste their cake and wine.
Here, as in a tale brought by M. Deulin from French Flanders, the polite
youngest son, by virtue of a Golden Goose, makes a very serious princess
laugh, and wins her for his wife. Turning on a similar moral conception
Grimm's _Mother Holle_ (24) is infinitely better than _Les Fees_. The
younger daughter drops her shuttle down a well; she is sent after it,
and reaches a land where apples speak and say, 'Shake us, we are all
ripe.' She does all she is asked to do, and makes Mother Holle's
feather-bed so well that the feathers (snow-flakes) fly about the world.
She goes home covered with golden wages, and her elder sister follows
her, but not her example. She insults the apples, is lazy at Mother
Holle's, and is sent home covered with pitch. Grimm gives many variants.
Mlle. L'Heritier amplifies the tale in her _Bigarrures_ (1696). The
story begins to be more exciting, when it is combined, as commonly
happens, with that of the substituted bride. It is odd enough that the
Kaffirs have the incident of the good and bad girl, the bad girl laughs
at the trees, as in Grimm's she mocks the apples (Theal, _Kaffir
Folklore_, p. 49). This tale (in which there is no miracle of uttering
toads or pearls) diverges into that of the _Snake Husband_, a rude
_Beauty and the Beast_. The Zulus again have the story of the
substituted bride ('Ukcombekcantsini,' Callaway's _Nursery Tales of the
Zulus_, Natal, 1868). The idea recurs in Theal's Kaffir Collection (p.
136); in both cases the substituted bride is a beast. In Scotland the
story of the _Black Bull o' Norroway_ contains the incident of the
substituted bride. The Kaffirs, in _The Wonderful Horns_, have a large
part of that story, but without the substituted bride, who, in Europe,
occasionally attaches herself as a sequel to _Toads and Diamonds_. This
is illustrated especially in Grimm's _Three Dwarfs in the Wood_ (13),
where the good girl's speech is made literally golden. The bad girl, who
speaks toads, marries the king's son who loves the good girl. Fragments
of verse, in which the good girl tries to warn her husband, resemble
those in the _Black Bull o' Norroway_. The tale is complicated by the
metamorphosis of the true bride (no great change her lover would say)
into 'a little duck.' She regains her shape when a sword is swung over
her. The bad girl is tortured like Regulus. This is _Bushy-bride_ in
Dasent's _Tales from the Norse_.
There seems to be no reason why the adventure of the good and bad
sisters should merge in the formula of the substituted bride, more than
in the adventure of the princess accused of bearing bestial children, or
in any other. Probably Perrault felt this, and, having made his moral
point, was content to do without the sequel.
_Les Fees_ is interesting then, first, as an example of a moral idea
illustrated in tales even in South Africa, and, secondly (in its longer
and more usual form), as an example of the manner in which any story may
glide into any other. All the incidents of popular tales, like the bits
of glass in a kaleidoscope, may be shaken into a practically limitless
number of combinations.
[Footnote 67: Antoninus Liberalis, xxxv.]
CENDRILLON.
_Cinderella._
The story of Cinderella (_Cendrillon_, _Cucendron_, _Cendreusette_,
_Sainte Rosette_) is one of the most curious in the history of
_Maerchen_. Here we can distinctly see how the taste and judgment of
Perrault altered an old and barbarous detail, and there, perhaps, we
find the remains of a very ancient custom.
There are two points in _Cinderella_, and her cousin _Peau d'Ane_,
particularly worth notice. First, there is the process by which the
agency of a _Fairy Godmother_ has been substituted for that of a
_friendly beast_, usually a connection by blood-kindred of the hero or
heroine. Secondly, there is the favouritism shown, in many versions, to
the _youngest child_, and the custom which allots to this child a place
by the hearth or in the cinders (_Cucendron_).
Taking the first incident, the appearance in Perrault of a Fairy
Godmother in place of a _friendly beast_, we may remark that this kind
of change is always characteristic of the promotion of a story. Just as
Indian 'aboriginal' tribes cashier their beast-ancestors ('Totems') in
favour of a human ancestor of a similar name, when they rise in
civilisation, so the _roles_ which are filled by beasts in savage
_Maerchen_ come to be assigned to men and women in the _contes_ of more
cultivated people[68]. In Cinderella, however, the friendly beast holds
its own more or less in nearly all European versions, except in those
actually derived from Perrault. In every shape of the story known to us,
the beast is a _domesticated animal_. Thus it will not be surprising if
no native version is found in America, where animals, except dogs, were
scarcely domesticated at all before the arrival of Europeans.
In examining the incident of the friendly and protecting beast, it may
be well to begin with a remote and barbarous version, that of the
Kaffirs. Here, as in other cases, we may find one situation in a
familiar story divorced from those which, as a general rule, are in its
company. Theorists may argue either that the Kaffirs borrowed from
Europeans one or two incidents out of a popular form of _Cinderella_, or
that they happen to make use of an opinion common to most early peoples,
the belief, namely, in the superhuman powers of friendly
beast-protectors. As to borrowing, Europeans and Kaffirs have been in
contact, though not very closely, for two hundred years. No one,
however, would explain the Kaffir custom of daubing the body with white
clay, in the initiatory rites, as derived from the similar practice of
the ancient Greeks[69]. Among the neighbouring Zulus, Dr. Callaway found
that _Maerchen_ were the special property of the most conservative
class,--the old women. 'It is not common to meet with a man who is
willing to speak of them in any other way than as something which he has
some dim recollection of having heard his grandmother relate[70].'
Whether the traditional lore of savage grandmothers is likely to have
been borrowed from Dutch or English settlers is a question that may be
left to the reader.
The tale in which the friendly beast of European folklore occurs among
the Kaffirs is _The Wonderful Horns_[71]. As among the Santals (an
'aboriginal' hilltribe of India) we have a hero, not a heroine. 'There
was once a boy whose mother that bore him was dead, and who was
ill-treated by his other mothers,' the Kaffirs being polygamous. He rode
off on an ox given him by his father. The ox fought a bull and won. Food
was supplied out of his right horn, and the 'leavings' (as in the _Black
Bull o'Norroway_) were put into the left horn. In another fight the ox
was killed, but his horns continued to be a magical source of supplies.
A new mantle and handsome ornaments came out of them, and by virtue of
this fairy splendour he won and wedded a very beautiful girl.
Here, it may be said, there is nothing of _Cendrillon_, except that rich
garments, miraculously furnished, help to make a marriage; and that the
person thus aided was the victim of a stepmother. No doubt this is not
much, but we might sum up _Cendrillon_ thus. The victim of a stepmother
makes a great marriage by dint of goodly garments supernaturally
provided.
In _Cendrillon_ the _recognition_ (anagnorisis) makes a great part of
the interest. There is no anagnorisis in the Kaffir legend, which is
very short, being either truncated or undeveloped.
Let us now turn to the Santals, a remote and shy non-Aryan hill-tribe of
India. Here we find the anagnorisis, but in a form not only
disappointing but almost cynical[72].
In the Santal story we have the cruel Stepmother, the hero,--not a
heroine, but a boy,--the protecting and friendly Cow, the attempt to
kill the Cow, the Flight, the great good-fortune of the hero, the
Princess who falls in love with a lock of his hair, which is to play the
part of Cinderella's glass slipper in the anagnorisis, and, finally, a
cynically devised accident, by which the beauty of the hair is
destroyed, and the hero's chance of pleasing the princess perishes. It
will be noticed that the use of a lock of hair floating down a river, to
be fallen in love with and help the _denouement_, is found, first, in
the Egyptian _conte_ of the _Two Brothers_, written down in the reign of
Ramses II., fourteen hundred years before our era.
In that story, too, the hero has a friendly cow, which warns him when he
is in danger of being murdered. But the Egyptian story has no other
connection with _Cendrillon_[73]. The device of a floating lock of hair
is not uncommon in Bengali _Maerchen_.
From the Santals let us turn to another race, not so remote, but still
non-Aryan, the Finns[74]. That the Santals borrow _Maerchen_ from their
Hinduised aboriginal neighbours is not certain, but is perfectly
possible and even probable. Though some theorists have denied that races
borrow nursery tales from each other, it is certain that Loennrot,
writing to Schiefner in 1855, mentions a Finnish fisher who, meeting
Russian and Swedish fishers, 'swopped stories' with them when stormy
weather made it impossible to put to sea[75]. No doubt similar
borrowings have always been going on when the peasantry on the frontiers
met their neighbours, and where Kaffirs have taken Hottentot wives, or
Sidonians have carried off Greek children as captives, in fact, all
through the national and tribal meetings of the world[76].
_The Wonderful Birch_ (Emmy Schreck, ix.) is a form of _Cinderella_ from
Russian Carelia. The story has a singularly dramatic and original
opening. A man and his wife had but one daughter, and one Sheep. The
Sheep wandered away, the woman sought him in the woods, and she met a
witchwife. The witchwife turned the woman into the semblance of the
Sheep, and herself took the semblance of the woman. She went to the
woman's house, where the husband thought he was welcoming his own wife
and the sheep that was lost. The new and strange stepmother demanded the
death of the Sheep, which was the real mother of the heroine. Warned by
the Sheep, a black sheep, the daughter did not taste of her flesh, but
gathered and buried the bones and fragments. Thence grew a beautiful
birch tree. The man and the witchwife went to court, the witchwife
leaving the girl to accomplish impossible tasks. The voice of the dead
mother from the grave below the birch bade the girl break a twig from
the tree, and therewith accomplish the tasks. Then out of the earth came
beautiful raiment (as in _Peau d'Ane_), and the girl dressed, and went
to court. The Prince falls in love with her, and detects her by means of
her ring, which takes the part of the slipper. Then comes in the
frequent formula of a false bride substituted by the witchwife, a number
of trials, and the punishment of the witch.
Here, then, the friendly beast is but the Mother surviving in two
shapes, first as a sheep, then as a tree, exactly the idea of the
ancient Egyptian story of the _Two Brothers_, where Bitiou first becomes
a bull, and then a persea tree[77]. In Finnish the Cinderella plot is
fully developed. A similar tale, still with the beast in place of the
Fairy Godmother, is quoted by Mr. Ralston from the Servian (_Vuk
Karajich_, No. 32). Three maidens were spinning near a cleft in the
ground, when an old man warned them not to let their spindles fall into
the cleft, or their mother would be changed into a cow. Mara's spindle
fell in, and the mother instantly shared the fate of Io. Mara tended the
cow that had been her mother lovingly, but the father married again, and
the new wife drove Mara to dwell among the cinders (_pepel_), hence she
was called _Pepelluga_, cinderwench[78]. The cruel Servian stepmother
had the cow slain, but not before it had warned Mara to eat none of the
kindred flesh[79], and to bury the bones in the ashes of the hearth.
From these bones sprang two white doves, which supplied Mara with
splendid raiment, and, finally, won for her the hand of the prince,
after the usual incidents of the lost slipper, the attempt to substitute
the stepmother's ugly daughter, and the warning of the fowls, 'Ki erike,
the right maiden is under the trough.'
In a modern Greek variant (Hahn, ii.), the Mother (not in vaccine form)
is eaten by her daughters, except the youngest, who refuses the hideous
meal. The dead woman magically aids the youngest from her tomb, and the
rest follows as usual, the slipper playing its accustomed part.
In Gaelic a persecuted stepdaughter is aided by a Ram. The Ram is
killed, his bones are buried by his _protegee_, he comes to life again,
but is lame, for his bones were not all collected, and he plays the part
of Fairy Godmother[80].
Turning from the Gaelic to the Lowland Scotch, we find _Rashin Coatie_
as a name under which either _Peau d'Ane_ or _Cendrillon_ may be
narrated. We discovered Cendrillon as _Rashin Coatie_, in
Morayshire[81]. Here a Queen does not become a _cow_, indeed, but dies,
and leaves to her daughter a _Red Calf_, which aids her, till it is
slain by a cruel stepmother.
The dead calfy said
_Tak me up, bane by bane
And pit me aneth yon grey stane,_
and whatever you want, come and seek it frae me, and I will
give you it.
The usual adventures of Cinderella ensue, the birds denouncing the False
Bride, whose foot is pinched to make it fit the 'beautiful satin
slipper' of the heroine.
In most of these versions the heroine is aided by a beast, and even when
that beast is dead, it continues helpful, in one case actually coming to
life again, like the ox in the South African _Maerchen_[82].
In all these thoroughly popular and traditional tales, the supernatural
machinery varies much from that of Perrault, who found _Peau d'Ane_
'difficile a croire.' But, in all the wilder tales, the machinery is
exactly what we note in the myths and actual beliefs of the lower races.
_They_ do not shrink from the conception of a mother who becomes a cow
(like Io), nor of a cow (as in the case of Heitsi Eibib among the
Hottentots), who becomes the mother of human progeny. It is not unlikely
that the Scotch mother, in _Rashin Coatie_, who bequeathes to her
daughter a wonder-working calf (a cow in Sicily, Pitre, 41), is a
modification of an idea like that of the cannibal Servian variant[83].
Then the _Mouton_ of Madame d'Aulnoy seems like a courtly survival of
the Celtic _Sharp Grey Sheep_ mixed with the _donnee_ of _Beauty and the
Beast_[84]. The notion of helpful animals makes all the 'Manitou'
element in Red Indian religion, and is common in Australia. The helpful
calf, or sheep, bequeathed by the dying mother, reminds one of the
equally helpful, but golden Ram, which aids Phrixus and Helle against
their stepmother, after the death or deposition of their mother Nephele.
This Ram also could speak,--
alla kai auden
andromeen proeeke kakon teras[85].
This recalls not only the Celtic _Sharp Grey Sheep_, but also Madame
d'Aulnoy and her princess, 'je vous avoue que je ne suis pas accoutumee
a vivre avec les moutons qui parlent.'
The older rural and popular forms of _Cinderella_, then, are full of
machinery not only supernatural, but supernatural in a wild way: women
become beasts, mothers are devoured by daughters (a thing that even Zulu
fancy boggles at), life of beast or man is a separable thing, capable of
continuing in lower forms. Thus we may conjecture that the ass's skin
worn by _Peau d'Ane_ was originally the hide of a beast helpful to her,
even connected, maybe, with her dead mother, and that the ass, like the
cow, the calf, the sheep, and the doves of _Maerchen_, befriended her,
and clothed her in wondrous raiment.
For all these antique marvels Perrault, or the comparatively civilised
tradition which Perrault followed, substituted, in _Peau d'Ane_, as in
_Cendrillon_, the Christian conception of a Fairy Godmother. This
substitute for more ancient and less _speciosa miracula_ is confined to
Perrault's tales, and occurs nowhere in purely traditional _Maerchen_. In
these as in the widely diffused ballad of the _Re-arisen Mother_--
'Twas late in the night and the bairns grat,
The Mother below the mouls heard that,--
the idea of a Mother's love surviving her death inspires the legend,
and, despite savage details, produces a touching effect (Ralston,
_Nineteenth Century_, Nov. 1879, p. 839).