Popular Tales

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-Moghâwir,' says Prof. Robertson-Smith, in Kinship in Early Arabia (p. 195), 'speaks of a South Arab tribe called Beni Hârith or Acârib, 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 Zabyân.' 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].

Les Fées.

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 Fées. 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 Fées 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.

Cendrillon.

Cinderella.

The story of Cinderella (Cendrillon, Cucendron, Cendreusette, Sainte Rosette) is one of the most curious in the history of Märchen. 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 rôles which are filled by beasts in savage Märchen 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 Märchen 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 (ἀναγνὠρισις) makes a great part of the interest. There is no ἀναγνὠρισις 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 ἀναγνὠρισις, 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 ἀναγνὠρισις, 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 dénouement, 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 Märchen.

From the Santals let us turn to another race, not so remote, but still non-Aryan, the Finns[74]. That the Santals borrow Märchen 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 Lönnrot, 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 protégée, 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

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 Märchen[82].

In all these thoroughly popular and traditional tales, the supernatural machinery varies much from that of Perrault, who found Peau d'Ane 'difficile à 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, Pitré, 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 donnée 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,—

ἀλλἀ καὶ αὐδὴν

ἀνδρομέην προέηκε κακὸν τέρας [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 accoutumée à 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 Märchen, 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 Märchen. In these as in the widely diffused ballad of the Re-arisen Mother—

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).

Another notable point in Cinderella is the preference shown, as usual, to the youngest child. Cinderella, to be sure, is a stepchild, and therefore interesting; but it is no great stretch of conjecture to infer that she may have originally been only the youngest child of the house. The nickname which connects her with the fireside and the ashes is also given, in one form or another, to the youngest son (Sir George Dasent, for some reason, calls him 'Boots') in Scandinavian tales. Cinderella, like the youngest son, is taunted with sitting in the ashes of the hearth. This notion declares itself in the names Cucendron, Aschenpüttel, Ventafochs, Pepelluga, Cernushka[86], all of them titles implying blackness, chiefly from contact with cinders. It has frequently been suggested that the success of the youngest child in fairy tales is a trace of the ideas which prevailed when Jüngsten-Recht, 'Junior-Right' or Borough English, was a prevalent custom of inheritance[87]. The invisible Bridegroom, of the Zulu Märchen, is in hiding under a snake's skin, because he was the youngest, and his jealous brethren meant to kill him, for he would be the heir. It was therefore the purpose of his brethren to slay the young child in the traditional Zulu way, that is, to avoid the shedding of 'kindred blood' by putting a clod of earth in his mouth. Bishop Callaway gives the parallel Hawaian case of Waikelenuiaiku. The Polynesian case of Hatupati is also adduced. In Grimm's Golden Bird the jealousy is provoked, not by the legal rights of the youngest, but by his skill and luck. The idea of fraternal jealousy, with the 'nice opening for a young man,' which it discovered (like Joseph's brethren) in a pit, occurs in Peruvian myth as reported by Cieza de Leon (Chronicles of the Yncas, Second Part). The diffusion of Jüngsten-Recht, or Maineté, the inheritance by the youngest, has been found by Mr. Elton among Ugrians, in Hungary, in Slavonic communities, in Central Asia, on the confines of China, in the mountains of Arracan, in Friesland, in Germany, in Celtic countries. In Scandinavia Liebrecht adduces the Edda, 'der jüngste Sohn Jarl's der erste König ist.' Albericus Trium Fontium mentions Prester John, 'qui cum fratrum suorum minimus esset, omnibus praepositus est.' In Hesiod we meet droit de juveignerie, as he makes Zeus the youngest of the Cronidae, while Homer, making Zeus the eldest, is all for primogeniture (Elton, Origins of English History, ch. viii. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde).

The authorities quoted raise a presumption that Jüngsten-Recht, an old and widely diffused law, might have left a trace on myth and Märchen. If Jüngsten-Recht were yielding place to primogeniture, if the elders were using their natural influence to secure advantages, then the youngest child, still heir by waning custom, would doubtless suffer a good deal of persecution. It may have been in this condition of affairs that the myths of the brilliant triumph of the rightful but despised heir, Cinderella, or Boots, were developed.

On the other hand, it is obvious that the necessities of fiction demand examples of failure in the adventures, to heighten the effect of the final success. Now the failures might have begun with the youngest, and the eldest might be the successful hero. But that would have reversed the natural law by which the eldest goes first out into danger. Moreover, the nursery audience of a conte de nourrice is not prejudiced in favour of the Big but of the Little Brother.

These simple facts of everyday life, rather than some ancient custom of inheritance, may be the cause of the favouritism always shown to the youngest son or daughter. (Compare Ralston, Russian Folk Tales, p. 81. The idea of jealousy of the youngest brother, mixed up with a miscellaneous assortment of motifs of folk tales, occurs in Katha-sarit-sagara, ch. xxxix.)

Against the notion that the successful youngest son or daughter of the contes is a descendant of the youngest child who is heir by droit de juveignerie, it has been urged that the hero, if the heir, would 'not start from the dust-bin and the coal-hole.' But if his heirship were slipping from him, as has been suggested, the ashes of the hearth are just what he would start from. The 'coal-hole,' of course, is a modern innovation. The hearth is the recognised legal position of the youngest child in Gavel-kind. 'Et la mesuage seit autreci entre eux departi, mes le Astre demorra al puné (ou al punée)[88].' In short, 'the Hearth-place shall belong to the youngest,' and as far as forty feet round it. After that the eldest has the first choice, and the others in succession according to age. The Custumal of Kent of the thirteenth century is the authority.

These rules of inheritance show, at least (and perhaps at most), a curious coincidence between the tales which describe the youngest child as always busy with the hearth, and the custom which bequeaths the hearth (astre) to the youngest child. To prove anything it would be desirable to show that this rule of Gavel-kind once prevailed in all the countries where the name of the heroine corresponds in meaning to Cendrillon.

The attention of mythologists has long been fixed on the slipper of Cinderella. There seems no great mystery in the Prince's proposal to marry the woman who could wear the tiny mule. It corresponds to the advantages which, when the hero is a man, attend him who can bend the bow, lift the stone, draw the sword, or the like. In a woman's case it is beauty, in a man's strength, that is to be tested. Whether the slipper were of verre or of vair is a matter of no moment. The slipper is of red satin in Madame d'Aulnoy's Finette Cendron, and of satin in Rashin Coatie. The Egyptian king, in Strabo and Ælian, merely concluded that the loser of the slipper must be a pretty woman, because she certainly had a pretty foot. The test of fitting the owner recurs in Peau d'Ane, where a ring, not a slipper, is the object, as in the Finnish Wonderful Birch tree.

M. de Gubernatis takes a different view of Cinderella's slipper. The Dawn, it appears, in the Rig Veda is said to leave no footsteps behind her (apad). This naturally identifies her with Cinderella, who not only leaves footsteps, probably, but one of her slippers. M. de Gubernatis reasons that apad 'may mean, not only she who has no feet, but also she who has no footsteps ... or again, she who has no slippers, the aurora having, as it appears, lost them.... The legend of the lost slipper ... seems to me to repose entirely upon the double meaning of the word apad, i.e. who has no foot, or what is the measure of the foot, which may be either the footstep or the slipper....' (Zoolog. Myth. i. 31). M. de Gubernatis adds that 'Cinderella, when she loses the slipper, is overtaken by the prince bridegroom.' The point of the whole story lies in this, of course, that she is not overtaken. Had she been overtaken, there would have been no need for the trial with the slipper (op. cit. i. 161). M. de Gubernatis, in this passage, makes the overtaking of Cinderella serve his purpose as proof; on p. 31 he derives part of his proof from the statement (correct this time) that Cinderella is not overtaken, 'because a chariot bears her away.' Another argument is that the dusky Cinderella is only brilliantly clad 'in the Prince's ball-room, or in church, in candle-light, and near the Prince,—the aurora is beautiful only when the sun is near.' Is the sun the candle-light, and is the Prince also the sun? If a lady is only belle à la chandelle, what has the Dawn to do with that?

M. André Lefèvre calls M. de Gubernatis's theory quelque peu aventureuse (Les Contes de Charles Perrault, p. lxxiv), and this cannot be thought a severe criticism. If we supposed the story to have arisen out of an epithet of Dawn, in Sanskrit, the other incidents of the tale, and their combination into a fairly definite plot, and the wide diffusion of that plot among peoples whose ancestors assuredly never spoke Sanskrit, would all need explanation.

In Perrault's Cinderella, we have not the adventure of the False or Substituted Bride, which usually swells out this and many other contes, and which, indeed, is apparently brought in by popular conteurs, whenever the tale is a little short. Thus it frequently winds up the story which Perrault gives so briefly as Les Fées. Among the Zulus[89], the Birds of the Thorn country warn the bridegroom that he has the wrong girl,—she is a beast (mbulu) in Zululand. The birds give the warning in Rashin Coatie[90], and birds take the same part in Swedish, Russian, German, but a dog plays the rôle in Breton (Reinhold Köhler, op. cit. p. 373). In a song of Fauriel's Chansons Romaiques the birds warn the girl that she is riding with a corpse. Birds give the warning in Gaelic (Campbell, No. 14).

Perrault did more than suppress the formula of the False Bride. By an artistic use of his Fairy Godmother he gave Cinderella her excellent reason for leaving the ball, not because cupit ipsa videri, but in obedience to the fairy dame. He made Cinderella forgive her stepsisters, and get them good marriages, in place of punishing them, as even Psyche does so treacherously in Apuleius, and as the wild justice of folk tales usually determines their doom. An Italian Cinderella breaks her stepmother's neck with the lid of a chest. But Cendrillon 'douce et bonne au début reste jusqu'à la fin douce et bonne' (Deulin, Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye, p. 286). These are examples of Perrault's refined way of treating the old tales. But in his own country there survives a version of Cendrillon in which a Blue Bull, not a Fairy Godmother, helps the heroine. From the ear of the Bull, as from his horn in Kaffir lore, the heroine draws her supplies. She is Jaquette de Bois, and reminds us of Katie Wooden cloak. Her mother is dead, but the Bull is not said to have been the mother in bestial form. (Sébillot, Contes Pop. de la Haute Bretagne, Charpentier, Paris, 1880, p. 15). In these versions the formula of Cendrillon shifts into that of The Black Bull o' Norroway.

Riquet à La Houppe.

Riquet of the Tuft.

Of all Perrault's tales Riquet is the least popular. Compared with the stories of Madlle. L'Heritier or of the Comtesse de Murat, even Riquet is short and simple. But it could hardly be told by a nurse, and it would not greatly interest a child. We want to know what became of the plain but lively sister, and she drops out of the narrative unnoticed. The touch of the traditional and popular manner in the story is the love of a woman redeeming the ugliness of a man. In one shape or another, from the Kaffir Bird who made Milk, or Five Heads, to what was probably the original form of Cupid and Psyche, this is the fundamental notion of Beauty and the Beast[91]. But Perrault hints that the miracle was purely 'subjective.' 'Some say that the Princess, reflecting on the perseverance of her lover, and all his good qualities, ceased to see that his body was deformed, and his face ugly.' There is therefore little excuse for examining here the legends of ladies, or lords, who marry a Tick (in Portugal), a Frog (in Scotland and India), a Beaver (in North America), a Pumpkin (in Wallachia), an Iron Stove (in Germany), a Serpent (in Zululand), and so forth. These tales are usually, perhaps, of moral origin, and convey the lesson that no magic can resist kindness. The strange husbands or wives are enchanted into an evil shape, till they meet a lover who will not disdain them. Moral, don't disdain anybody. Some have entertained angels unawares. But this apologue could only have been invented when there was a general belief in powers of enchantment and metamorphosis, a belief always more powerful in proportion to the low culture of the people who entertain it. In the Kaffir tale, where the girl disenchants the Crocodile by licking him (kissing, perhaps, being unfamiliar), the man who comes out of the crocodile skin merely says that the girl's 'power' (her native magical force) is greater than that of 'the enemies of his father's house,' who had enchanted him (Theal, The Bird who made Milk). This idea may and does exist apart from the notion, which so commonly accompanies it, of a taboo, or prohibition on freedom of intercourse between the lover and the lady, either of whom has been disenchanted by the other.

If the original and popular basis of this kind of story was moral, the moral was strangely coloured by the fancy of early men. In Perrault little but the moral, told in a gallant apologue, remains. It may be compared with a Thibetan story, analysed by M. Gaston Paris[92].

Le Petit Poucet.

Hop o' my Thumb.

Perrault's tale of Le Petit Poucet has nothing but the name in common with the legend of Le Petit Poucet (our 'Tom Thumb') on which M. Gaston Paris has written a learned treatise. The Poucet who conducts the Walloon Chaur-Poce, our 'Charles's Wain,' merely resembles Hop o' my Thumb in his tiny stature, and little can be gained by a comparison of two personages so unlike in their adventures (Gaston Paris, Mém. de la Société de Linguistique, i. 4, p. 372).

In Hop o' my Thumb, as Perrault tells it, there are many traces of extreme antiquity.

The incidents are (1) Design of a distressed father and mother to expose their children in a forest. (2) Discovery and frustration of the scheme by the youngest child, whose clue leads him and his brethren home again. (3) The same incident, but the clue (scattered crumbs) spoiled by birds. (4) Arrival of the children at the house of an ogre. They are entertained by his wife, but the ogre discovers them by the smell of human flesh. (5) Hop o' my Thumb shifts the golden crowns of the ogre's children to the heads of his brethren, and the ogre destroys his own family in the dark. (6) Flight of the boys, pursued by the ogre in Seven-Leagued Boots. (7) There is a choice of conclusion. In one (8) Hop o' my Thumb steals the boots of the sleeping ogre, and gets his treasures from the ogre's wife. (9) Hop o' my Thumb steals the boots and by their aid wins court favour. Throughout the tale the skill of an extremely small boy is the subject of admiration.

(1) The opening of the story has nothing supernatural or unusual in it. During the famines which Racine and Vauban deplored, peasants must often have been tempted to 'lose' their children (Sainte-Beuve, Port Royal, vi. 153; Mémoires sur la Vie de Jean Racine. A Genève, M.DCCXLVII, pp. 271-3).

(2) The idea of dropping objects which may serve as a guide or 'trail' is so natural and obvious that it is used in 'paper-chases' every day. In the Indian story[93] of Surya Bai, a handful of grains is scattered, the pearls of a necklace are used in the Raksha's Palace, in Grimm (15, Hänsel and Grethel) white pebbles and crumbs of bread are employed. The Kaffir girl drops ashes[94]. In Nennilloe Nennella (Pentamerone, v. 8) the father of the children has pity on them, and makes a trail of ashes. Bran is used on the second journey, but it is eaten by an ass[95].

(4) The children arrive at the house of an ogre, whose wife treats them kindly; the ogre, however, smells them out.

This incident, quite recognisable, is found in Namaqua Folklore (Bleek, Bushman Folk Lore). A Namaqua woman has married an elephant. To her come her two brothers, whom she hides away. 'Then the Elephant, who had been in the veldt, arrived, and smelling something, rubbed against the house.' His wife persuades him that she has slain and cooked a wether, indeed she does cook a wether, to hide the smell of human flesh.

Compare Perrault, 'L'Ogre flairoit droite et à gauche, disant qu'il sentoit la chair fraîche. Il faut, luy dit sa femme, que ce soit ce veau que je viens d'habiller que vous sentez.' But the ogre, like the blind mother of the Elephant in Namaqua, retains his suspicions. In the Zulu tale of Uzembeni (Callaway, p. 49) there is an ogress very hungry and terrible, who has even tried to eat her own daughters. She comes home, where Uzembeni is concealed, and says, 'My children, in my house here today there is a delicious odour!' As Callaway remarks, this 'Fee-fo-fum' incident recurs in Maori myth, when Maui visits Murri-ranga-whenua, and in the legend of Tawhaki, where the ogre is a submarine ogre (Grey's Polynes. Myth. pp. 34, 64). In a more familiar passage the Eumenides utter their fee-fo-fum when they smell out Orestes[96].

In the extreme north-west of America this world-wide notion meets us again, among the Dènè Hareskins (Petitot, Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest, Paris, 1886, p. 171). The stranger comes to strange people, 'un jeune garçon sort d'une maison et dit, Moi, je sens l'odeur humaine ... ce disant, il humait l'air, et reniflait à la manière d'un limier qui est sur une piste.' In the Aberdeenshire Mally Whuppy, we have the old

The idea of cannibalism, which inspires most of these tales, like the Indian stories of Rakshas, is probably derived from the savage state of general hostility and actual anthropophagy (Die Anthropophagie, Überlebsel im Volksglauben.' Andree, Leipzig, 1887). We know that Basutos have reverted to cannibalism in this century; in Labrador and the wilder Ojibbeway districts, Weendigoes, or men returned to cannibalism, are greatly dreaded (Hind's Explorations in Labrador, i. p. 59). There are some very distressing stories in Kohl (Kitchi Gami, p. 355-359). A prejudice against eating kindred flesh, (as against eating Totems or kindred animals and vegetables,) is common among savages. Hence the wilder South American tribes, says Cieza de Leon, bred children they might lawfully eat from wives of alien stock, the father being reckoned not akin to his children, who follow the maternal line. Thus the great prevalence of cannibalism in European Märchen seems a survival from the savage condition. In savage Märchen, where cannibalism is no less common, it needs little explanation; not that all savages are cannibals, but most live on the frontier of starvation, and have even less scruple than Europeans in the ultimate resort.

(5) Arrived at the ogre's house, Hop o' my Thumb deceives the cannibal, and makes him slay his own children.

This is decidedly a milder form of the incident in which the captive either cooks his captor, or makes the captor devour some of his own family. In Zululand (Callaway, pp. 16-18, Uhlakanyana) we find the former agreeable adventure. Uhlakanyana, trapped by the cannibal, gets the cannibal's mother to play with him at boiling each other. The old lady cries out that she is 'being done,' but the artful lad replies, 'When a man has been thoroughly done, he does not keep crying I am already done. He just says nothing when he is already done.... Now you have become silent; that is the reason why I think you are thoroughly done. You will be eaten by your children.' Callaway justly compares the Gaelic Maol a Chliobain, who got the Giant's mother to take her place in the Giant's game-bag,—with consequences (Campbell, i. 255). In Grimm's Hänsel and Grethel Peggy bakes the ogress. The trick recurs in the Kaffir Hlakanyana[98]. There are two ways of doing this trick in popular tales: either the prisoner is in a sack, and induces another person to take his place (as in the Aberdonian Mally Whuppy, and among the Kaffirs); or they play at cooking each other; or, in some other way, the captive induces the captor to enter the pot or oven, and, naturally, keeps him there. This is the device of the German Grethel and the Zulu Uhlakanyana. The former plan, of the game-bag, prevails among the South Siberian peoples of the Turkish race. Tardanak was caught by a seven-headed monster and put in a bag. He made his way out, and induced the monster's children to take his place. The monster, Jalbagan, then cooked his own children. Perrault wisely makes his ogre a little intoxicated, but he did not carry his mistake so far as to eat his children.

The expedient by which Hop o' my Thumb saves his company, and makes the ogre's children perish, differs from the usual devices of the game-bag and the oven. Hop o' my Thumb exchanges the nightcaps of himself and his brothers for the golden crowns of the ogre's daughters. But even this is not original. In the many Märchen which are melted together into the legend of the Minyan House of Athamas, this idea occurs. According to Hyginus, Themisto, wife of Athamas, wished to destroy the children of her rival Ino. She, therefore, to distinguish the children, bade the nurse dress her children in white night-gowns, and Ino's children in black. But this nurse (so ancient is the central idea of East Lynne) was Ino herself in disguise, and she reversed the directions she had received. Themisto, therefore, murdered her own children in the dusk, as the ogre slew his own daughters. M. Deulin quotes a Catalan tale, in which the boys escape from a cupboard, where they place the daughters of the ogress, and they then sleep in the daughters' bed.

(6) The flight of Hop o' my Thumb and his brethren is usually aided, in Zulu, Kaffir, Iroquois, Samoan, Japanese, Scotch, German, and other tales, by magical objects, which, when thrown behind the fugitives, become lakes, forests, and the like, thus detaining the pursuer. Perrault knows nothing of this. His seven-leagued boots, used by the ogre and stolen by the hero, doubtless are by the same maker as the sandals of Hermes; the goodly sandals, golden, that wax never old (Odyssey, v. 45).

In addition to these shoon, and the shoon of Loki, and the slippers of Poutraka in the Kathasaritsagara (i. 13), we may name the seven-leagued boots in the very rare old Italian rhymed Historia delliombruno, a black-letter tract, which contains one of the earliest representations of these famous articles.

While these main incidents of Hop o' my Thumb are so widely current, the general idea of a small and tricksy being is found frequently, from the Hermes of the Homeric Hymn to the Namaqua Heitsi Eibib, the other Poucet, or Tom Thumb, and the Zulu Uhlakanyana. Extraordinary precocity, even from the day of birth, distinguishes these beings (as Indra and Hermes) in myth. In Märchen it is rather their smallness and astuteness than their youth that commands admiration, though they are often very precocious. The general sense of the humour of 'infant prodigies' is perhaps the origin of these romances.

For a theory of Hop o' my Thumb, in which the forest is the night, the pebbles and crumbs the stars, the ogre the devouring Sun, the ogre's daughters 'the seven Vedic sisters,' and so forth, the curious may consult M. Hyacinthe Husson, M. André Lefèvre, or M. Frédérick Dillaye's Contes de Charles Perrault (Paris, 1880).

CONCLUSION.

The study of Perrault's tales which we have made serves to illustrate the problems and difficulties of the subject in general. It has been seen that similar and analogous contes are found among most peoples, ancient and modern. When the resemblances are only in detached ideas and incidents, for example, the introduction of rational and loquacious beasts, or of magical powers, the difficulty of accounting for the diffusion of such notions is comparatively slight. All the backward peoples of the world believe in magic, and in the common nature of men, beasts, and things. The real problem is to explain the coincidence in plot of stories found in ancient Egypt, in Peru, in North America, and South Africa, as well as in Europe. In a few words it is possible to sketch the various theories of the origin and diffusion of legends like these.

I. According to what may be called the Aryan theory (advocated by Grimm, M. André Lefèvre, Von Hahn, and several English writers), the stories are peculiar to peoples who speak languages of the Aryan family. These peoples, in some very remote age, before they left their original seats, developed a copious mythology, based mainly on observation of natural phenomena, Dawn, Thunder, Wind, Night, and the like. This mythology was rendered possible by a 'disease of language,' owing to which statements about phenomena came to appear like statements about imaginary persons, and so grew into myths. Märchen, or popular tales, are the débris, or detritus, or youngest form of those myths, worn by constant passing from mouth to mouth. The partisans of this theory often maintain that the borrowing of tales by one people from another is, if not an impossible, at least a very rare process.

II. The next hypothesis may be called the Indian theory. The chief partisan of this theory was Benfey, the translator and commentator of the Pantschatantra. In France M. Cosquin, author of Contes Populaires de Lorraine, is the leading representative. According to the Indian theory, the original centre and fountain of popular tales is India, and from India of the historic period the legends were diffused over Europe, Asia, and Africa. Oral tradition, during the great national movements and migrations, and missions,—the Mongol conquests, the crusades, the Buddhist enterprises, and in course of trade and commerce, diffused the tales. They were also in various translations,—Persian, Arabic, Greek,—of Indian literary collections like the Pantschatantra and the Hitopadesa, brought to the knowledge of mediæval Europe. Preachers even used the tales as parables or 'examples' in the pulpit, and by all those means the stories found their way about the world. It is admitted that the discovery of contes in Egypt, at a date when nothing is known of India, is a difficulty in the way of this theory, as we are not able to show that those contes came from India, nor that India borrowed them from Egypt. The presence of the tales in America is explained as the consequence of importations from Europe, since the discovery of the New World by Columbus.

Neither of these theories, neither the Aryan nor the Indian, is quite satisfactory. The former depends on a doctrine about the 'disease of language' not universally accepted. Again, it entirely fails to account for the presence of the contes (which, ex hypothesi, were not borrowed) among non-Aryan peoples. The second, or Indian theory, correctly states that many stories were introduced into Europe, Asia, and Africa from India, in the middle ages, but brings no proof that contes could only have been invented in India, first of all. Nor does it account for the stories which were old in Egypt, and even mixed up with the national mythology of Egypt, before we knew anything about India at all, nor for the Märchen of Homeric Greece. Again it is not shown that the ideas in the contes are peculiar to India; almost the only example adduced is the gratitude of beasts. But this notion might occur to any mind, anywhere, which regarded the beasts as on the same intellectual and moral level as humanity. Moreover, a few examples have been found of Märchen among American races, for example, in early Peru, where there is no reason to believe that they were introduced by the Spaniards[99].

In place of these hypotheses, we do not propose to substitute any general theory. It is certain that the best-known popular tales were current in Egypt under Ramses II, and that many of them were known to Homer, and are introduced, or are alluded to, in the Odyssey. But it is impossible to argue that the birthplace of a tale is the country where it is first found in a literary shape. The stories must have been current in the popular mouth long before they won their way into written literature, on tablets of clay or on papyrus. They are certainly not of literary invention. If they were developed in one place, history gives us no information as to the region or the date of their birth. Again, we cannot pretend to know how far, given the ideas, the stories might be evolved independently in different centres. It is difficult to set a limit to chance and coincidence, and modern importation. The whole question of the importation of stories into savage countries by civilised peoples has not been studied properly. We can hardly suppose that the Zulus borrowed their copious and most characteristic store of Märchen, in plot and incident resembling the Märchen of Europe, from Dutch or English settlers. On the other hand, certain Algonkin tales recently published by Mr. Leland bear manifest marks of French influence.

Left thus in the dark without historical information as to the 'cradle' of Märchen, without clear and copious knowledge as to recent borrowing from European traders and settlers, and without the power of setting limits to the possibility of coincidence, we are unable to give any general answer to the sphinx of popular tales. We only know for certain that there is practically no limit to the chances of transmission in the remote past of the race. Wherever man, woman, or child can go, there a tale may go, and may find a new home. Any drifted and wandering canoe, any captured alien wife, any stolen slave passed from hand to hand in commerce or war, may carry a Märchen. These processes of transmission have been going on, practically, ever since man was man. Thus it is even more difficult to limit the possibilities of transmission than the chances of coincidence. But the chances of coincidence also are numerous. The ideas and situations of popular tales are all afloat, everywhere, in the imaginations of early and of pre-scientific men. Who can tell how often they might casually unite in similar wholes, independently combined?

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