Edwin Sidney Hartland

“ Thus armed, he takes service as a scullion in the palace; and on successive Thursday evenings he fights a five-, a ten-, and a fifteen-headed troll, to whom the princess has been promised, and slays them all. Lillekort and the trolls defy one another in a style leaving nothing to be desired. “Fire!” screamed the fifteen-headed troll. “Fire likewise!” shouted Lillekort. “Canst thou fight?” cried the troll. “If I cannot, I can learn,” retorted the undaunted hero. “I’ll learn thee!” cried the troll, and struck out with his iron bar so that the earth flew fifteen ells high in the air. ”

“ When a man, either without passing through death and birth, or passing through death only, changes into a wolf or an ant, it is no more than Transformation. But if the metamorphosis be effected by death and growth into a tree, or a fresh birth from brute or human mother, it is obvious that there is more difficulty in affirming identity between the new substance and the old. In some cases, if we may trust our authorities, and if we rightly interpret the tales and ritual and beliefs they report, the savage sets this difficulty at defiance: the proofs of identity overcome it. ”

“ If we examine stories of the Danae type, or The King of the Fishes type, we find that when, as usually in the former case, a maiden is the hero’s mother, only one child is born of her. It is sufficiently remarkable for a virgin to bring forth one child. But when, as in the greater number of variants of the latter type, a married woman is the mother, the prodigy must be placed beyond doubt by a double or threefold birth, and often by its repetition upon other animals who partake of the impregnating influence. ”

“ When the cherry-tree is cut down, a cherry is sprinkled, and a beautiful blue bird comes out of it. The treacherous wife is desirous of catching it; and her new husband lays down the hero’s magical sword to enable him to move more freely. ”

“ And, advancing to savage theory and its correlative customs, I hope I have made it plain that stories of metamorphosis, whether märchen or sagas, have been founded upon the belief that at death men are not annihilated, but pass into fresh forms, sometimes appearing as plants and trees, sometimes as animals of the lower creation, and sometimes as men and women born again into their own kindred or among strangers. ”

“ In the course of our examination of tales of Supernatural Birth we have more than once found that birth was to the hero merely a new manifestation. He had previously existed in other shapes, and by undergoing birth (preceded sometimes, but not always, by death) he was entering on a new career, he was ascending a new stage of being. The child in the Annamite story of Posthumous Revenge had been an eel, with liberty of metamorphosis into other forms. Marjatta’s child in the half-heathen postscript to the Kalevala had been the creator of the sun and moon. ”

“ In return, it furnishes the brothers with horses, clothing, armour, swords and money; and they ride forth to seek adventures. The life-token is a cut in a fig-tree, which flows with milk or blood. The elder youth is the dragon-slayer. A slave is the impostor who claims the reward of the victory. The worm’s seven tongues in the lady’s handkerchief prove his treachery and the hero’s right. One evening after his marriage the hero goes out to see a bright light upon a certain mountain, and falls a victim to the Medusa-witch. ”

“ An ewe swallows some of the ashes, and bears two lambs, marked like the boys, with a moon on the head and a star on the nape of the neck. The new queen orders the lambs to be slaughtered, and their entrails to be thrown out into the street. ”

“ Not merely is the hero duplicated; the gift of weapons is transformed into the acquisition of faithful attendant animals, and the incident of the Gorgon’s Head, postponed to the slaughter of the dragon, becomes a night adventure with a supernatural cat in the forest. The differences, in fact, are such as to preclude the notion of any lineal connection between them. A large proportion of the modern stories agree with that of Water-Peter and Water-Paul where it diverges most widely from the classical legend; and those which do not so agree differ in one way or other still further. ”

“ She has been carried off by a dragon. The brothers are twins. Their father, a fisherman, had caught a pike, which had bequeathed its eyes as the life-tokens, to turn black when the heroes were in mortal peril. The elder brother goes into the world, visiting on the way his sister, from whom he receives a sword. He saves the king’s only daughter from a sea-troll, and marries her. The Medusa-witch dwells on a floating island, which the youth must needs explore. ”

“ Two brothers catch a bird on whose head is inscribed the words: “Whosoever roasts and eats my head will find every day a bagful of gold.” Their father, reading this, intends to eat the head; but the two boys steal the bird when it is cooked; and the elder eats the body, and the younger the head. They wander out together, and part at a giant oak-tree. The life-token is a knife stuck in the tree. Hans, the elder, by sparing the lives of a fox, a wolf and a bear, gets them as followers. With their help he slays the seven-headed dragon and rescues the king’s daughter. ”

“ After his marriage he walks with his wife—who is no princess, only the fairest girl of the town—in the fields, and sees a little house, which he thinks he should like to buy as a hunting-box. She bids him beware, for it has a bad reputation. This whets his curiosity, and he goes to make inquiries. Having knocked at the door, he is answered from within and told that he cannot break the door in, as he threatens to do, but the way to enter is to pull out a hair from his head and pass it through the hole for the cat. The earth swallows him as soon as he complies. ”

“ As usually told, a girl or a boy is killed by an envious brother and buried. Some time after, a bone is picked up and fashioned into a shepherd’s pipe; or a reed growing on the grave is cut and made into a similar instrument. No sooner does the musician put the pipe to his mouth than the voice of the murdered child is heard within it, reciting his death and accusing his murderer. Occasionally, however, the tree, or plant, which grows from the grave sings or speaks of itself, as in the Dahoman version, where a mushroom appears on the grave. ”

“ I have not attempted to deal with every story, nor with every kind of story. I have limited myself so far as possible to narratives analogous to those in the different forms of the Perseus myth, and to little more than specimens of them. In treating of sagas we have been able to show a range extended beyond that of märchen. The Supernatural Birth, in the forms in which we have studied it, is known throughout Europe, Asia, and America, and in large groups of the Pacific Islands. It is repeated again and again in the Chinese and other Mongolian traditions. ”

“ A Bosnian märchen presents us with a type wherein only the Supernatural Birth and the Medusa-witch are preserved. A pilgrim gives an apple to a childless man. His wife is to eat it, the peel is to be divided between the mare and the bitch, and the seeds are to be planted in the garden. The elder twin, with his horse and dog, and his lance of apple-wood, swims across the sea, and in doing so becomes gilt. He marries a king’s daughter, and pursues a stag with golden horns, which leads him to a tower. ”

“ The fatal prophecy, which is the centre of the whole plot in the classical tale, is, in fact, commonly omitted in modern folktales of this type. We do not find it in either of the German stories; and even in the Tuscan its force is greatly weakened. It is absent also from the Swedish märchen of Silverwhite and Littlewarder. In that story a widower-king, going to the wars, places his only daughter alone with a single waiting-woman in a tower to guard her honour. An old woman, suborned by youths who are angry at being denied access to the princess, gives her two enchanted apples. ”

“ Encouraged, probably, by success, the beast, shortly after, seized the princess. Again it is the old smith who gives advice. The beast was only to be killed in one way. Her soul was in an egg, in the mouth of a trout, inside a hoodie, which was inside a white-footed hind that dwelt on an island in the midst of the loch. If the egg were broken, the beast would die. The hero invoked the help of the great dog, the falcon and the otter. The great dog caught the hind. A hoodie sprang out of her, and the falcon brought it to earth. ”

“ When this was known to the khan he ordered her to be put to death; but, being dissuaded from so extreme a course, he allowed his wife to lock the maiden in a golden chest, together with some food, and to fling the chest into the sea, first binding the key on the outside. Two heroes, hunting, see the chest on the water. Agreeing between themselves that the one should take the chest and the other its contents, whatever they were, they capture and drag it ashore. On opening it they find the girl, who tells them her tale, and after her babe’s birth weds one of them. ”

“ In none of the foregoing stories do we find the hero victorious by means of a second birth from a woman. In a White-Russian variant of The Outcast Wife group, the heroine, married to a king, has two sisters, who deceive the king as to her offspring and cause her twin boys to be buried alive. Out of their graves grow two maples, one with a golden, the other with a silver, stem. The king puts away his wife, and marries one of her sisters. She has the maples cut down to make a bed, and afterwards burns the bed and sprinkles the ashes on the road. ”

“ The maiden’s son is a new birth of the saint, who proves his sanctity when a child of only five years by convincing his grandfather and his mother’s godfather of the salvation of a poor, despised, dead beggar, and the damnation of a wealthy sinner, though borne to his grave upon a costly bier and accompanied by monks with burning tapers, and by revealing the existence of a hoard of gold beneath a dunghill. ”

“ An acute observer points out that among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast and the Ewe-speaking tribes of the Slave Coast, a distinction is drawn between the ghostly self that continues the man’s existence after death in the spirit-world, and his kra or ñoli, which is capable of being born again in a new human body. In the eastern Ewe districts and in Dahome the soul is, by either an inconsistency or a subtlety, believed to remain in the land of the dead and to animate some new child of the family at one and the same time ”

“ It will be remembered that Mughain, before she bore Aedh Sláine, did more than drink of the consecrated water: she washed in it. Stories of conception by bathing have been seriously believed alike in the Old and New Worlds. A Zulu saga represents a king’s daughters as bathing in a pool in the river. The youngest, a mere child, comes out with breasts swollen as large as a woman’s. By the advice of the council of old men she is driven away. After wandering from place to place she gives birth to a boy who grows up a wise doctor. ”

“ In the stage of civilisation wherein the stories are told and the practices obtain, medicine and surgery are not as yet separated from magic. We cannot therefore, speak positively as to the meaning and intention of all. But it is clear that a large number of the practices, as well as of the stories, imply, if we are not told in so many words, that the real origin of the child afterwards born is not the semen received in the act of coition, but the drug, or the magical potency of the incantation. ”

“ In a forest they meet, one after another, several troops of animals—hares, foxes, wolves, bears, lions—who dissuade the precocious twins from shooting them, by bestowing on each of them one of themselves. The brothers part. The elder rescues a princess from a dragon, and suffers death at the hands of a Gipsy who has watched the combat; but he is brought to life again by his beasts with the Water of Life and Healing, and weds the princess. He observes that a fire burns all night long in a certain house. On inquiry he is told that an old snake dwells there. ”

“ He travels on, and delivers another princess from a seven-headed monster who haunts a fountain. The impostor is a charcoal-burner, discovered in the usual manner. While the princess, his wife, is bathing one day, the hero takes the opportunity of walking through some of the rooms of their castle which he has not before examined. At the end of a corridor he opens a door, and finds himself in a vast plain filled with statues of human form. He meets an old woman who hands him a stick, on taking which he is immediately petrified. ”

“ He calls a public assembly, in order to try the sandal on the men. The hero dresses in rags, and lames his horse, his falcon and his hound. Consequently, he is at first passed by in contempt; but he cannot escape the trial. The ascetic instincts of the heroes of these tales are remarkable: they will do anything to escape recognition and marriage. In the present case, when the sandal is fitted to his foot, the king generously says to the dragon-slayer: “I will give you my daughter gratis: become king, and I will be your minister.” This is an offer the masculine Cinderella cannot refuse. ”

“ Yehl, the Thlinkit hero-god, repeatedly became the son of ladies, who were beguiled into swallowing a pebble, a blade of grass, or even a drop of water, which was no other than the divinity in disguise. The subject, however, is so important, not merely in the general study of savage ideas, but in relation to the myth of Perseus, especially in its modern forms, that it is necessary to deal with it a little more at length. ”

“ It cannot of course be asserted that in every instance of magical practices collected in the present chapter, pregnancy is believed to be supernaturally caused by the means prescribed, apart from the natural means, as in the tales. Indeed, the natural means are often expressly to be employed in addition to the magical ceremonies. Yet the line between natural and supernatural is so faint in savage minds that it is difficult to know how much is to be ascribed to the one and how much to the other. ”