Indian Fairy Tales Part 26

In this particular case we may be doubtful; but in others, again--as the incident of the rat's tail up nose (see Notes on _The Charmed Ring_)--there can be little doubt of the Indian origin. And generally, so far as the incidents are marvellous and of true fairy-tale character, the presumption is in favour of India, because of the vitality of animism or metempsychosis in India throughout all historic time. No Hindu would doubt the fact of animals speaking or of men transformed into plants and animals. The European may once have had these beliefs, and may still hold them implicitly as "survivals"; but in the "survival" stage they cannot afford material for artistic creation, and the fact that the higher minds of Europe for the last thousand years have discountenanced these beliefs has not been entirely without influence. Of one thing there is practical certainty: the fairy tales that are common to the Indo-European world were invented once for all in a certain locality, and thence spread to all the countries in culture contact with the original source. The mere fact that contiguous countries have more similarities in their story store than distant ones is sufficient to prove this: indeed, the fact that any single country has spread throughout it a definite set of folk-tales as distinctive as its flora and fauna, is sufficient to prove it. It is equally certain that not all folk-tales have come from one source, for each country has tales peculiar to itself. The question is as to the source of the tales that are common to all European children, and increasing evidence seems to show that this common nucleus is derived from India and India alone. The Hindus have been more successful than others, because of two facts: they have had the appropriate "atmosphere" of metempsychosis, and they have also had spread among the people sufficient literary training and mental grip to invent plots. The Hindu tales have ousted the native European, which undoubtedly existed independently; indeed, many still survive, especially in Celtic lands. Exactly in the same way, Perrault's tales have ousted the older English folk-tales, and it is with the utmost difficulty that one can get true English fairy tales because _Red Riding Hood_, _Cinderella_, _Blue Beard_, _Puss in Boots_ and the rest, have survived in the struggle for existence among English folk-tales. So far as Europe has a common store of fairy tales, it owes this to India.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not hold with Benfey that all European folk-tales are derived from the Bidpai literature and similar literary products, nor with M. Cosquin that they are all derived from India. The latter scholar has proved that there is a nucleus of stories in every European land which is common to all. I calculate that this includes from 30 to 50 per cent. of the whole, and it is this common stock of Europe that I regard as coming from India mainly at the time of the Crusades, and chiefly by oral transmission. It includes all the beast tales and most of the drolls, but evidence is still lacking about the more serious fairy tales, though it is increasing with every fresh collection of folk-tales in India, the great importance of which is obvious from the above considerations.

In the following Notes I give, as on the two previous occasions, the _source_ whence I derived the tale, then _parallels_, and finally _remarks_. For Indian _parallels_ I have been able to refer to Major Temple's remarkable a.n.a.lysis of Indian Folk-tale incidents at the end of _Wideawake Stories_ (pp. 386-436), for European ones to my alphabetical List of Incidents, with bibliographical references, in _Transactions of Folk-Lore Congress_, 1892, pp. 87-98. My _remarks_ have been mainly devoted to tracing the relation between the Indian and the European tales, with the object of showing that the latter have been derived from the former. I have, however, to some extent handicapped myself, as I have avoided giving again the Indian versions of stories already given in _English Fairy Tales_ or _Celtic Fairy Tales_.

I. THE LION AND THE CRANE.

_Source._--V. Fausboll, _Five Jatakas_, Copenhagen, 1861, pp. 35-8, text and translation of the _Javasakuna Jataka_. I have ventured to English Prof. Fausboll's version, which was only intended as a "crib" to the Pali. For the omitted Introduction, see _supra_.

_Parallels._--I have given a rather full collection of parallels, running to about a hundred numbers, in my _aesop_, pp. 232-4. The chief of these are: (1) for the East, the Midras.h.i.+c version ("Lion and Egyptian Partridge"), in the great Rabbinic commentary on Genesis (_Beres.h.i.+th-rabba_, c. 64); (2) in cla.s.sical antiquity, Phaedrus, i. 8 ("Wolf and Crane"), and Babrius, 94 ("Wolf and Heron"), and the Greek proverb Suidas, ii. 248 ("Out of the Wolf's Mouth"); (3) in the Middle Ages, the so-called Greek _aesop_, ed. Halm, 276 _b_, really prose versions of Babrius and "Romulus," or prose of Phaedrus, i. 8, also the Romulus of Ademar (fl. 1030), 64; it occurs also on the Bayeux Tapestry, in Marie de France, 7, and in Benedict of Oxford's _Mishle Shualim_ (Heb.), 8; (4) Stainhowel took it from the "Romulus" into his German aesop (1480), whence all the modern European aesops are derived.

_Remarks._--I have selected _The Wolf and the Crane_ as my typical example in my "History of the aesopic Fable," and can only give here a rough summary of the results I there arrived at concerning the fable, merely premising that these results are at present no more than hypotheses. The similarity of the Jataka form with that familiar to us, and derived by us in the last resort from Phaedrus, is so striking that few will deny some historical relation between them. I conjecture that the Fable originated in India, and came West by two different routes. First, it came by oral tradition to Egypt, as one of the Libyan Fables which the ancients themselves distinguished from the aesopic Fables. It was, however, included by Demetrius Phalereus, tyrant of Athens, and founder of the Alexandrian library c. 300 B.C., in his _a.s.semblies of aesopic Fables_, which I have shown to be the source of Phaedrus' Fables c. 30 A.D. Besides this, it came from Ceylon in the Fables of Kybises--_i.e._, Kasyapa the Buddha--c. 50 A.D., was adapted into Hebrew, and used for political purposes, by Rabbi Joshua ben Chananyah in a harangue to the Jews c. 120 A.D., begging them to be patient while within the jaws of Rome. The Hebrew form uses the lion, not the wolf, as the ingrate, which enables us to decide on the Indian _provenance_ of the Midras.h.i.+c version. It may be remarked that the use of the lion in this and other Jatakas is indirectly a testimony to their great age, as the lion has become rarer and rarer in India during historic times, and is now confined to the Gir forest of Kathiawar, where only a dozen specimens exist, and are strictly preserved.

The verses at the end are the earliest parts of the Jataka, being in more archaic Pali than the rest: the story is told by the commentator (c. 400 A.D.) to ill.u.s.trate them. It is probable that they were brought over on the first introduction of Buddhism into Ceylon, c. 241 B.C. This would give them an age of over two thousand years, nearly three hundred years earlier than Phaedrus, from whom comes our _Wolf and Crane_.

II. PRINCESS LABAM.

_Source._--Miss Stokes, _Indian Fairy Tales_, No. xxii. pp. 153-63, told by Muniya, one of the ayahs. I have left it unaltered, except that I have replaced "G.o.d" by "Khuda," the word originally used (see Notes _l. c._, p. 237).

_Parallels._--The tabu, as to a particular direction, occurs in other Indian stories as well as in European folk-tales (see notes on Stokes, p.

286). The _grateful animals_ theme occurs in "The Soothsayer's Son"

(_infra_, No. x.), and frequently in Indian folk-tales (see Temple's a.n.a.lysis, III. i. 5-7; _Wideawake Stories_, pp. 412-3). The thorn in the tiger's foot is especially common (Temple, _l. c._, 6, 9), and recalls the story of Androclus, which occurs in the derivates of Phaedrus, and may thus be Indian in origin (see Benfey, _Panschatantra_, i. 211, and the parallels given in my _aesop_, Ro. iii. I. p. 243). The theme is, however, equally frequent in European folk-tales: see my List of Incidents, _Proc. Folk-Lore Congress_, p. 91, s.v. "Grateful Animals" and "Gifts by Grateful Animals."

Similarly, the "Bride Wager" incident at the end is common to a large number of Indian and European folk-tales (Temple, a.n.a.lysis, p. 430; my List, _l. c. sub voce_). The tasks are also equally common (_cf._ "Battle of the Birds" in _Celtic Fairy Tales_), though the exact forms as given in "Princess Labam" are not known in Europe.

_Remarks._--We have here a concrete instance of the relation of Indian and European fairy-tales. The human mind may be the same everywhere, but it is not likely to hit upon the sequence of incidents, _Direction tabu_--_Grateful Animals_--_Bride-wager_--_Tasks_, by accident, or independently: Europe must have borrowed from India, or India from Europe. As this must have occurred within historic times, indeed within the last thousand years, when even European peasants are not likely to have _invented_, even if they believed, in the incident of the grateful animals, the probability is in favour of borrowing from India, possibly through the intermediation of Arabs at the time of the Crusades. It is only a probability, but we cannot in any case reach more than probability in this matter, just at present.

III. LAMBIKIN.

_Source._--Steel-Temple, _Wideawake Stories_, pp. 69-72, originally published in _Indian Antiquary_, xii. 175. The droll is common throughout the Panjab.

_Parallels._--The similarity of the concluding episode with the finish of the "Three Little Pigs" (_Eng. Fairy Tales_, No. xiv.) In my notes on that droll I have pointed out that the pigs were once goats or kids with "hair on their chinny chin chin." This brings the tale a stage nearer to the Lambikin.

_Remarks._--The similarity of Pig No. 3 rolling down hill in the churn and the Lambikin in the Drumikin can scarcely be accidental, though, it must be confessed, the tale has undergone considerable modification before it reached England.

IV. PUNCHKIN.

_Source._--Miss Frere, _Old Deccan Days_, pp. 1-16, from her ayah, Anna de Souza, of a Lingaet family settled and Christianised at Goa for three generations. I should perhaps add that a Prudhan is a Prime Minister, or Vizier; Punts are the same, and Sirdars, n.o.bles.

_Parallels._--The son of seven mothers is a characteristic Indian conception, for which see Notes on "The Son of Seven Queens" in this collection, No. xvi. The mother transformed, envious stepmother, ring recognition, are all incidents common to East and West; bibliographical references for parallels may be found under these t.i.tles in my List of Incidents. The external soul of the ogre has been studied by Mr. E. Clodd in _Folk-Lore Journal_, vol. ii., "The Philosophy of Punchkin," and still more elaborately in the section, "The External Soul in Folk-tales," in Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_, ii.

pp. 296-326. See also Major Temple's a.n.a.lysis, II. iii., _Wideawake Stories_, pp. 404-5, who there gives the Indian parallels.

_Remarks._--Both Mr. Clodd and Mr. Frazer regard the essence of the tale to consist in the conception of an external soul or "life-index,"

and they both trace in this a "survival" of savage philosophy, which they consider occurs among all men at a certain stage of culture. But the most cursory examination of the sets of tales containing these incidents in Mr. Frazer's a.n.a.lyses shows that many, indeed the majority, of these tales cannot be independent of one another; for they contain not alone the incident of an external materialised soul, but the further point that this is contained in something else, which is enclosed in another thing, which is again surrounded by a wrapper.

This Chinese ball arrangement is found in the Deccan ("Punchkin"); in Bengal (Day, _Folk-Tales of Bengal_); in Russia (Ralston, p. 103 _seq._, "Koschkei the Deathless," also in Mr. Lang's _Red Fairy Book_); in Servia (Mijatovics, _Servian Folk-Lore_, p. 172); in South Slavonia (Wratislaw, p. 225); in Rome (Miss Busk, p. 164); in Albania (Dozon, p. 132 _seq._); in Transylvania (Haltrich, No. 34); in Schleswig-Holstein (Mullenhoff, p. 404); in Norway (Asbjornsen, No.

36, _ap._ Dasent, _Pop. Tales_, p. 55, "The Giant who had no Heart in his Body"); and finally, in the Hebrides (Campbell, _Pop. Tales_, p.

10, _cf. Celtic Fairy Tales_, No. xvii., "Sea Maiden"). Here we have the track of this remarkable idea of an external soul enclosed in a succession of wrappings, which we can trace from Hindostan to the Hebrides.

It is difficult to imagine that we have not here the actual migration of the tale from East to West. In Bengal we have the soul "in a necklace, in a box, in the heart of a _boal_ fish, in a tank"; in Albania "it is in a pigeon, in a hare, in the silver tusk of a wild boar"; in Rome it is "in a stone, in the head of a bird, in the head of a leveret, in the middle head of a seven-headed hydra"; in Russia "it is in an egg, in a duck, in a hare, in a casket, in an oak"; in Servia it is "in a board, in the heart of a fox, in a mountain"; in Transylvania "it is in a light, in an egg, in a duck, in a pond, in a mountain"; in Norway it is "in an egg, in a duck, in a well, in a church, on an island, in a lake"; in the Hebrides it is "in an egg, in the belly of a duck, in the belly of a wether, under a flagstone on the threshold." It is impossible to imagine the human mind independently imagining such bizarre convolutions. They were borrowed from one nation to the other, and till we have reason shown to the contrary, the original lender was a Hindu. I should add that the mere conception of an external soul occurs in the oldest Egyptian tale of "The Two Brothers," but the wrappings are absent.

V. THE BROKEN POT.

_Source._--_Pantschatantra_, V. ix., tr. Benfey, ii. 345-6.

_Parallels._--Benfey, in -- 209 of his _Einleitung_, gives bibliographical references to most of those which are given at length in Prof. M. Muller's brilliant essay on "The Migration of Fables"

(_Selected Essays_, i. 500-76), which is entirely devoted to the travels of the fable from India to La Fontaine. See also Mr.

Clouston, _Pop. Tales_, ii. 432 _seq._ I have translated the Hebrew version in my essay, "Jewish Influence on the Diffusion of Folk-Tales," pp. 6-7. Our proverb, "Do not count your chickens before they are hatched," is ultimately to be derived from India.

_Remarks._--The stories of Alnaschar, the Barber's fifth brother in the _Arabian Nights_, and of La Perette, who counted her chickens before they were hatched, in La Fontaine, are demonstrably derived from the same Indian original from which our story was obtained. The travels of the "Fables of Bidpai" from India to Europe are well known and distinctly traceable. I have given a rough summary of the chief critical results in the introduction to my edition of the earliest English version of the _Fables of Bidpai_, by Sir Thomas North, of Plutarch fame (London, D. Nutt, "Bibliotheque de Carabas," 1888), where I have given an elaborate genealogical table of the mult.i.tudinous versions. La Fontaine's version, which has rendered the fable so familiar to us all, comes from Bonaventure des Periers, _Contes et Nouvelles_, who got it from the _Dialogus Creaturarum_ of Nicholaus Pergamenus, who derived it from the _Sermones_ of Jacques de Vitry (see Prof. Crane's edition, No. li.), who probably derived it from the _Directorium Humanae Vitae_ of John of Capua, a converted Jew, who translated it from the Hebrew version of the Arabic _Kalilah wa Dimnah_, which was itself derived from the old Syriac version of a Pehlevi translation of the original Indian work, probably called after Karataka and Damanaka, the names of two jackals who figure in the earlier stories of the book. Prof. Rhys-Davids informs me that these names are more akin to Pali than to Sanskrit, which makes it still more probable that the whole literature is ultimately to be derived from a Buddhist source.

The theme of La Perette is of interest as showing the _literary_ transmission of tales from Orient to Occident. It also shows the possibility of an influence of literary on oral tradition, as is shown by our proverb, and by the fact, which Benfey mentions, that La Fontaine's story has had influence on two of Grimm's tales, Nos. 164, 168.

VI. THE MAGIC FIDDLE.

_Source._--A. Campbell, _Santal Folk-Tales_, 1892, pp. 52-6, with some verbal alterations. A Bonga is the presiding spirit of a certain kind of rice land; Doms and Hadis are low-caste aborigines, whose touch is considered polluting. The Santals are a forest tribe, who live in the Santal Parganas, 140 miles N.W. of Calcutta (Sir W. W. Hunter, _The Indian Empire_, 57-60).

_Parallels._--Another version occurs in Campbell, p. 106 _seq._, which shows that the story is popular among the Santals. It is obvious, however, that neither version contains the real finish of the story, which must have contained the denunciation of the magic fiddle of the murderous sisters. This would bring it under the formula of _The Singing Bone_, which M. Monseur has recently been studying with a remarkable collection of European variants in the Bulletin of the Wallon Folk-Lore Society of Liege (_cf. Eng. Fairy Tales_, No. ix.).

There is a singing bone in Steel-Temple's _Wideawake Stories_, pp. 127 _seq._ ("Little Anklebone").

_Remarks._--Here we have another theme of the common store of European folk-tales found in India. Unfortunately, the form in which it occurs is mutilated, and we cannot draw any definite conclusion from it.

VII. THE CRUEL CRANE OUTWITTED.

_Source._--The Baka-Jataka, Fausboll, No. 38, tr. Rhys-Davids, pp.

315-21. The Buddha this time is the Genius of the Tree.

[Ill.u.s.tration:]

_Parallels._--This Jataka got into the Bidpai literature, and occurs in all its mult.i.tudinous offshoots (_see_ Benfey, _Einleitung_, -- 60) among others in the earliest English translation by North (my edition, pp. 118-22), where the crane becomes "a great Paragone of India (of those that liue a hundredth yeares and neuer mue their feathers)." The crab, on hearing the ill news "called to Parliament all the Fishes of the Lake," and before all are devoured destroys the Paragon, as in the Jataka, and returned to the remaining fishes, who "all with one consent gave hir many a thanke."

_Remarks._--An interesting point, to which I have drawn attention in my Introduction to North's Bidpai, is the probability that the ill.u.s.trations of the tales as well as the tales themselves, were translated, so to speak, from one country to another. We can trace them in Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic MSS., and a few are extant on Buddhist Stupas. Under these circ.u.mstances, it may be of interest to compare with Mr. Batten's conception of the Crane and the Crab (_supra_, p. 50) that of the German artist who ill.u.s.trated the first edition of the Latin Bidpai, probably following the traditional representations of the MS., which itself could probably trace back to India.

VIII. LOVING LAILI.

_Source._--Miss Stokes, _Indian Fairy Tales_, pp. 73-84. Majnun and Laili are conventional names for lovers, the Romeo and Juliet of Hindostan.

_Parallels._--Living in animals' bellies occurs elsewhere in Miss Stokes' book, pp. 66, 124; also in Miss Frere's, 188. The restoration of beauty by fire occurs as a frequent theme (Temple, a.n.a.lysis, III.

vi. f. p. 418). Readers will be reminded of the _denouement_ of Mr.

Rider Haggard's _She_. Resuscitation from ashes has been used very effectively by Mr. Lang in his delightful _Prince Prigio_.

_Remarks._--The white skin and blue eyes of Prince Majnun deserve attention. They are possibly a relic of the days of Aryan conquest, when the fair-skinned, fair-haired Aryan conquered the swarthier aboriginals. The name for caste in Sanskrit is _varna_, "colour"; and one Hindu cannot insult another more effectually than by calling him a black man. _Cf._ Stokes, pp. 238-9, who suggests that the red hair is something solar, and derived from myths of the solar hero.