The very first of our tales illustrates admirably the general course of
their history. It is, in effect, a folk etymology of the name of the
great capital of the Eastern Empire. Constantinople, so runs the tale,
received that name instead of Byzantium, because of the remarkable career
of one of its former rulers, Coustans. M. Wesselovsky has published in
_Romania_ (vi. 1. seq.) the _Dit de l’empereur Constant_, the verse
original of the story before us, and in this occur the lines—
Pour ce que si _nobles_ estoit
Et que nobles œvres faisoit
L’appielloient _Constant le noble_
Et pour çou ot _Constantinnoble_
Li cytés de Bissence a non.
From which it would appear that we are mistaken in thinking of the
capital of Turkey as the “City of Constantine,” whereas it is rather
Constant the Noble, and the name Coustant is further explained as
“costing” too much. Constantinople, therefore, is the city that costs
too much, according to the prophetic etymology of the folk.
The only historic personage with whom this Coustant can be identified is
Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine the Great and the husband
of St. Helena, to whom legend ascribes the discovery of the Holy Rood.
But the Coustans of our story never lived or ruled on land or sea, and
his predecessor, Muselinus, is altogether unknown to Byzantine annals,
while their interlaced history reads more like a page of the _Arabian
Nights_ than of Gibbon.
But such a legend could scarcely have arisen elsewhere than at
Constantinople. It is one of those fables that the disinherited folk
have at all times invented to solace themselves for their disinherison.
The sudden and fated rise of one of the folk to the heights of power
occurs sufficiently often to afford material for the day dreams of
ambitious youth. There is even a popular tendency to attribute a lowly
origin to all favourites of fortune, as witness the legends that have
grown up about the early careers of Beckett, Whittington, Wolsey, none of
whom was as ill-born as popular tradition asserts. Yet such legends
invariably grow up in the country of their heroes, which is the only one
sufficiently interested in their career, so far as the common people are
concerned. Hence the very nature of our story would cause us to locate
its origin on the banks of the Bosphorus.
But once originated in this manner, there is no limit to the travels it
may take. Curiously enough, the very legend before us in all its details
has found a home among the English peasantry. The Rev. S. Baring-Gould
collected in Yorkshire a story which he contributed to Henderson’s
_Folklore of the Northern Counties_, and entitled _The Fish and the
Ring_. {2} In this legend a girl comes as the unwelcome sixth of the
family of a very poor man who lived under the shadow of York Minster. A
Knight, riding by on the day of her birth, discovers, by consultation of
the Book of Fate, that she was destined to marry his son. He offers to
adopt her, and throws her into the River Ouse. A fisherman saves her,
and she is again discovered after many years by the Knight, who learns
what Fate has still in store for his son. He sends her to his brother at
Scarborough with a fatal letter, ordering him to put her to death. But
on the way she is seized by a band of robbers, who read the letter and
replace it by one ordering the Baron’s son to be married to her
immediately on her arrival.
When the Baron discovers that he has not been able to evade the decree of
fate he still persists in his persecution, and taking a ring from his
finger throws it into the sea, saying that the girl shall never live with
his son till she can show him that ring. She wanders about and becomes a
scullery-maid at a great castle, and one day when the Baron is dining at
the castle, while cleaning a great fish she finds his ring, and all ends
happily.
Now on the east wall of the chancel of Stepney Church there is a monument
erected to Dame Rebecca Berry, wife of Thomas Elton, of Stratford, Bow,
and relict of Sir John Berry, 1696. The arms on the monument are thus
blazoned by heralds . . . . “Paly of six on a bend three mullets (Elton)
impaling a fish, and in the dexter chief point an annulet between two
bends wavy.” The reference in the impalement of the blazon is obvious.
A local tradition confidently identifies Dame Berry as the heroine of the
Yorkshire legend, though of course it is ignorant of her connection with
the etymology of Constantinople.
Now this tale, or the first half of it, is but a Yorkshire variant of one
spread throughout Europe. The opening of the twenty-ninth story of the
collection of the Brothers Grimm, and entitled _The Devil with the Three
Golden Hairs_, is exactly the same, and in their Notes they give
references to many similar European folk-tales. The story is found in
Modern Greece (Von Hahn, No. XX.), and it is, therefore, possible that
the story of King Coustans is the adaptation of a Greek folk-tale for the
purposes of a Folk Etymology. But the letter, “On delivery, please kill
bearer,” is scarcely likely to have occurred twice to the popular
imagination, and one is almost brought to the conclusion that the romance
before us was itself either directly or indirectly the source of all the
European Folk-tales in which the letter “To kill bearer” occurs. And as
we have before traced the Romance back to Constantinople, one is further
tempted to trace back the Letter itself to a reminiscence of Homer’s
σηματα λυγρά.
I have said above that no Greek original of any of these Romances has
hitherto been discovered. But in the case of King Coustans we can at any
rate get within appreciable distance of it. As recently as 1895 a
learned Teuton, Dr. Ernst Kuhn, pointed out, appropriately enough in the
_Byzantinische Zeitschrift_, the existence of an Ethiopic and of an
Arabic version of the legend. He found in one of Mr. Quaritch’s
catalogues a description of an illuminated Ethiopic MS., once belonging
to King Theodore of Magdala fame, which from the account given of several
of the illustrations he was enabled to identify as the story of “The Man
born to be King.” His name in the Ethiopic version is Thalassion, or
Ethiopic words to that effect, and the Greek _provenance_ of the story is
thereby established. Dr. Kuhn was also successful in finding an Arabic
version done by a Coptic Christian. In both these versions the story is
told as a miracle due to the interference of the Angel Michael; and it is
a curious coincidence that in Mr. Morris’ poetical version of our story
in the “Earthly Paradise” he calls his hero Michael. Unless some steps
are taken to prevent the misunderstanding, it is probable that some
Teutonic investigator of the next century will, on the strength of this
identity of names, bring Mr. Morris in guilty of a knowledge of Ethiopic.
But for the name of the hero one might have suspected these Oriental
versions of being derived, not from a Greek, but from an Indian original.
Mr. Tawney has described a variant found in the _Kathākosa_ {3} which
resembles our tale much more closely than any of the European folk-tales
in the interesting point that the predestined bride herself finds the
fatal letter and makes the satisfactory substitution. In the Indian tale
this is done with considerable ingenuity and _vraisemblance_. The girl’s
name is Visha, and the operative clause of the fatal letter is:
“Before this man has washed his feet, do thou with speed
Give him poison (_visham_), and free my heart from care.”
The lady thinks (or wishes) that her father is a bad orthographist, and
corrects his spelling by omitting the final _m_, so that the letter reads
“Give him Visha,” with results more satisfactory to the young lady than
to her father. This variant is so very close to our tale, while the
letter incident in it is so much more naturally developed than in the
romance that one might almost suspect it of having been the original.
But we must know more about the _Kathākosa_ and about the communication
between Byzantium and India before we can decisively determine which came
first.