'Yes, ah yes! I remember it now.'
And when the second pigeon said, 'Yes, ah yes! I remember it now,'
the whole of the past came back to his mind, and with it all his love
for Filagranata. So he rose up [26] and would have stroked the pigeons
which had brought it all to his mind, but when he touched them they
melted away, and the sweetmeats were scattered all over the table,
and the guests picked them up. But the prince ran in haste to fetch
Filagranata, and he brought her and placed her by his side in the
banquet-hall. But the second bride was sent back, with presents,
to her own people.
'And so it all came right at last,' pursued the
narrator. 'Lackaday! that there are no fairies now to make things
all happen right. There are plenty of people who seem to have the
devil in them for doing you a mischief, but there are no fairies to
set things straight again, alas!'
[I have placed this story first in order, as its incidents ramify
into half the traditionary tales with which we are acquainted.
(1.) 'Rapunzel,' No. 12 in 'Grimm,' is the most like it among the
German in the beginning, and has the most dissimilar ending. The
counterpart form, in which it is some misdeed or ill-luck of the
father instead of the mother, which involves the surrender of the
first-born, is the more frequent opening, as in 'The Water King,'
Ralston's 'Russian Folk Tales,' p. 120. 'The Lassie and her Godmother,'
in Dr. Dasent's 'Norse Tales,' has an opening like 'Filagranata,'
which, as it proceeds, connects it with 'Marienkind,' No. 4 in
'Grimm;' and the prohibition to open the room, in that one, carries
on the connexion to another group, the Bluebeard group, represented
in this series by 'Monsoo Mostro,' 'Rè Moro,' &c.; while, further on,
'Lassie and her Godmother' evolves the incident of the reflection
in the well, which connects it with the following story in this
collection, and in this roundabout way, though not in direct form,
with the termination of 'Filagranata.'
(2.) The introduction of an orange as a help to defy the 'orca,'
connects the story again with the two next (though the fruit is
used differently), and with a vast number of myths, as pointed
out in Campbell's 'Tales of the West Highlands,' Introduction,
pp. lxxx-lxxxv. I was rather put off the scent by the narrator using
the word portogallo: melagranata, though properly a pomegranate,
is, I think, used in old Italian for an orange, being simply a red,
or golden, apple.
(3.) The three gifts of the trowel, the comb, and the oil-filler,
again bring this story in connexion with another vast group. Compare
'Campbell,' iv. 290; also his remarks, i. 58-62, on the 'Battle of the
Birds,' which story this resembles in the main, but, as will be found
throughout this collection, the Roman form is milder. The prince wins
his bride without performing tasks, and the couple, in escaping, have
only to kill a strange 'orca,' and not the girl's own father. In the
third version of the tale in Mr. Campbell's series, the girl becomes
a poultry-maid, and has three fine dresses, constituting a link with
another group--that of Cinderella (I have given the Tirolean one as
'Klein-Else' in 'Household Stories from the Land of Hofer'); and the
three dresses there (though not in the Gaelic story) representing the
sun, moon, and stars, give it another connexion with 'Marienkind.' 'The
Master Maid,' in Dr. Dasent's collection, again, has the golden apple
(though it assists in a different way) and the ending of the Roman
version (a golden cock there taking the part of the two paste pigeons),
but begins with the tasks in the 'Giant's House' of the Gaelic version,
which the Roman ignores.
In the Russian story of 'Baba Yaga' (Ralston's 'Russian Folk Tales,'
pp. 139) we have the three magic gifts. Though Mr. Campbell has a
very ingenious solution for the idea of the supernatural attaching
to swords (i. lxxii), the same does not seem at all to explain
the introduction of supernatural combs; when I once found a comb
transformed into a mountain in a Tirolean story, I thought, as
Mr. Ralston has also suggested (p. 144), that it fitted very well
with the German expression for a mountain-ridge; but he does not tell
us whether the metaphor holds good in Russ, where he finds it used;
and in the present instance it is a hedge of thorns into which the
comb resolves itself. I have another Roman story, in which the comb
'swelled and swelled till every one of its teeth became a pier, and
the spaces between them were arches, and it was a bridge by which
one could pass over.'
(4.) The kiss which brings forgetfulness, again, is found in the
myths of every country. It occurs in the Tirolean story I have given
as the 'Dove-Maiden' in 'Household Stories from the Land of Hofer,'
though I had to omit it there for want of space; but the remaining
episodes of that story are nearly identical with those of the Russian
story of 'The Water-King;' and in the Tirolean story the maiden
is fetched from a heathen magician's house by the aid of saints,
while in the others it is from giants' or witches' abodes, by aid
of other giants and witches. Mr. Ralston supplies, at pp. 132-7,
a long list of variants of this story, and in a Russian one, at
p. 133, comes a ride on a Bear, which is one of the incidents in the
'Dove-Maiden,' though, if I remember right, it does not occur in any
of the others. In Mr. Campbell's notes to 'The Battle of the Birds'
are also collected notices of variants of this episode.
The affinity of this story with others again will be found in Mr. Cox's
'Mythology of the Aryan Nations,' ii. p. 301.]