Edwin Sidney Hartland

“ The abrupt transitions of a traditional ballad do not enable us to judge whether the damsel was long occupied in removing the consequences of his saintly disregard of cleanliness; for her next exclamation is: “Rise up, rise up, O conqueror! The water foams, and the dragon is sharpening his teeth for me!” Her tears flowed like an impetuous river, and wetted the saint in his {44} armour of gold. He sprang at the winged monster, and with a thrust of his javelin stretched him dead. The king in his gratitude offered him his daughter in marriage. ”

“ How far the tale of the loving spirit, Vira, is accepted by the Tuscan peasant as a recital of facts may be disputed. We have little but internal evidence to guide us; and that hardly seems conclusive. It may perhaps be regarded as a saga once inspired by faith in the powers of a supernatural being, but now the subject of more or less scepticism. The effect of doubt on a story would be to sever its moorings and set it free on the vague waters of tradition, unhampered by any names of known persons or places, or to which a serious credit is intended to be attached. ”

“ Like every human work, there is, of course, a sense in which it is true so to speak of it. Every tale-teller is more or less of an artist, and every tale he tells is a work of art. It is formed of his recollections of other tales told by other tellers, joined and cemented together as best he can by the aid of his own invention. A plot is composed of incidents cohering sometimes more firmly, sometimes less. Often the tale-teller forgets one, patches the story with another from his stock, or inserts an additional incident at pleasure. ”

“ This treachery against civilisation, against the public weal, against truth itself, may succeed for a moment; but only to evoke a retribution which will be strictly measured by its success. It is no light thing to divorce the intellect of a nation from its religion; it is disastrous to attempt to coop the intellect within the bounds of a religion which have become too strait for it. ”

“ Sometimes the hero is possessed of extraordinary strength, which enables him to overcome his foe. An example is found on the island of Syra, where a tale is told of an ogre who was in the habit of eating anybody who came in his way. Strong Jack fights and kills him, thus delivering a king’s daughter, whom he marries. But she is afterwards carried off by a monster, a half-man with only one eye, one hand, and one foot. Her husband, strong as he is, attacks the half-man in vain. He cannot be killed, for his external soul consists of two doves in the belly of a certain wild sow. ”

“ There is one characteristic, however, which is common to a vast number of variants belonging to almost every type, and which, in the story from the Odenwald, stands out in full relief. If it be not a savage characteristic, at least it is not in accordance with the etiquette of civilisation in the nineteenth century for the hero to persist in such unaccountable modesty, that, having slain the monster and won the princess, he must be pursued like a criminal flying from justice, and compelled to confess and claim his reward. ”

“ To examine every kind of enchantment current in märchen would be an endless task. In the classical story, as well as in a large number of modern märchen, petrification is the result of the evil spell. This is softened in the Játaka, and in some other tales, to mere imprisonment; while metamorphosis into trees or into brute forms is the result in other cases. Petrifaction, or change into stones or rocks, is a fate whereto not merely human beings are liable at the hands of supernatural powers: with the hero his horse and other animals undergo this misfortune. ”

“ To living gods like these food was a daily necessity; and for such as were carnivorous flesh, doubtless part of the daily sacrifices, must have been provided. A savage nation on days of festival, or under stress of some great impending calamity, would not hesitate to give human flesh. If, by the concurrence of an advance in civilisation and a political revolution, the worship of any such divinity were suppressed, he would become in tradition a deadly monster; and the milder divinity who succeeded to his place in popular regard would be credited with his conquest and destruction. ”

“ The tale of Troy was, like the story of Perseus, much more than a local legend. It was the common property of the classical world, and may well have formed part of the inheritance of all the Balkan nations. The intrusive barbarians who settled from time to time during the decadence of the empire about the Danube and the Balkans, must also have had their legends of dragon-slaying, whose essential identity with those of the original population would be recognised. ”

“ A big giant then comes for the king’s daughter, whom a squint-eyed, red-haired cook undertakes to save, his price being the maiden in marriage. The cook hides behind a stone and covers himself with sea-weed. Lod comes upon the scene and meets the heroine weeping. He comforts her, and lying down with his head on her knee he begs her to relieve him of the vermin. If he fell asleep under the lulling influences of this operation she was to waken him by cutting off the point of his little finger. On the giant’s appearance the princess wakens him. ”

“ Popular as the story of the rescue of the devoted maiden is, and appealing as it does to the imagination, it is not a little remarkable that it appears to be indigenous only in the Old World. Legends of the slaughter of a destructive monster are by no means so confined in their range, where there is no specific human being to deliver; and not infrequently they form part of the cosmogony of peoples alien in race and occupying distant portions of the globe. Few of them exhibit any details in common with those of the Perseus cycle. ”

“ From their childhood they were, like the heroes of many Western märchen, incurably idle. To avoid being put to work, they left home together. A magician gives them two enchanted sabres, either of which will vanquish a whole army. Moreover, if one of the youths die, the sabre of the other will rust; and by means of it the dead youth can be brought back to life. ”

“ At the proper moment he binds them on his hands, and they draw him direct to the sea-shore over-against an island on which the monster has made his lair. The youth crosses the water, slays and flays the dragon, and brings its hide and horns to the Lady of Earth and Sea, thus completing his tasks and winning her as his bride: an unhappy match, for the masterful dame ends by calling the waters upon the land and drowning every human creature, while she hovers aloft in the air looking on. ”

“ In offerings to water, and in traditions of water-spirits, we have the product of savage animism. And it may, of course, be that the monster sent to devour Andromeda, and that which appears so often in the legend of Saint George, are to be regarded simply as the personification of water, or of specific rivers and pools, in their sinister aspect. Strictly speaking, however, personification belongs to a higher plane of thought than that which finds the spirit embodied as an actual living creature. Moreover, the dragon is by no means invariably connected with water ”

“ A sorceress advises him how to pass a monster whom he will meet in the way, and warns him that he will reach the castle of another witch, who will offer him all sorts of fruits, of which he may partake with safety, but he must beware of drinking the wine she will present, otherwise she will petrify him. Instead, he is to give it to his dog, and he will see it instantly changed to marble. The witch, however, will have power to recall the animal to life. The youth follows her directions, and finds his brothers already turned to statues in the witch’s palace. ”

“ The youth tells him to pick up the card himself. As he stoops for the purpose a blow from the mace puts an end to him. Three Tartaros are thus overcome; and their mansion passes into the possession of the hero. The combat with the triple serpent lasts two days. The victor returns to the Tartaro’s palace, merely taking the seven tongues and the seven pieces of silk, and thus enabling the charcoal-burner to make his false claim. The king in his joy gives a dinner to his friends, to which of course the hero is not invited. The Tartaros owned three olanos, ogre-dogs. ”

“ On the way he stops at an inn, and there meets a chimney-sweeper—a new and more modern shape of our old acquaintance, the charcoal-burner. Imprudently he shows the tongues to his new acquaintance, who robs him of them, and boldly claims the princess. The hero, however, gets wind of the wedding, and, breaking into the festivities, demands permission to speak. He cross-examines the bridegroom: “Are you the bridegroom?” “Yes.” “How did you manage to deliver this maiden?” ”

“ We are bound, therefore, to postulate the existence in Greece, in an earlier and more barbarous age than that which was familiar with the legend in its classical shape, of a folktale substantially similar to that recovered in the last hundred years from all parts of the area I have described. For if the modern form of the tale be not derived from the legend as found in classical literature, neither can it be ascribed to derivation in post-classical days from the special story-store of India. ”

“ The king’s daughter is to be devoured by “an urfeist, a great serpent of the sea, a monster which must get a king’s daughter to devour every seven years.” Hundreds and hundreds of kings’ sons and champions were anxious to save her, but were so frightened at the terrible urfeist that they would not go near her when she was conducted to the beach in readiness for her death. The hero rides down on the black horse, clad in the black gear he has found in the first giant’s castle. Dismounting, he lays his head in the maiden’s lap and falls asleep, waiting for the monster. ”

“ It is true that he made war on the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros; but these could have furnished no hints for the construction of the winged dragon or the lindwurm. We may indeed reasonably ask what hints were needed beyond the existence of snakes and birds or bats? The conscious weakness of humanity, the mystery of serpentine motions, the magnifying, the combining and the distorting powers of human imagination, amply account for the result. The hero who is believed to have succeeded in vanquishing a monster thus created, is regarded as somewhat more than man ”

“ The peculiarities of a manuscript are not quite parallel with those of a tale. We cannot be positive that the incident in the Cambodian story is derived from the Egyptian. We can only say that its form is later in civilisation, and therefore perhaps in time. For aught we know the incident in the Egyptian märchen may in its turn be derived from an earlier one, which may be the common parent of the incident in the tale of The Two Brothers and in the Cambodian variant of the Perseus group. There is no record which will enable us to pronounce with entire confidence an opinion on the point. ”

“ What is most remarkable is that an overwhelming proportion of the cases in which the impostors may be considered as of the class indicated in the Megaran tradition are found in lands beyond the direct classical influence. In the Balkan peninsula and the Greek islands, in Italy, Spain, and France, the all but invariable impulse of the story-teller is to degrade the impostor in rank and to render him physically, as well as morally, repellent. If all the stories, both within the Perseus group and beyond it, be taken into the calculation, the results will not be found very different. ”

“ The conquest of the dragon by attacking it from the inside carries us back to Herakles’ deliverance of Hesione. The incident, rare in modern folklore, is also found in a Gipsy tale from Transylvania; but there, as might be anticipated, there is no question of a sea-monster. Radu, a young Gipsy of the Kukuya stock, driven to desperation by his shrewish wife, cleaves her head with a hatchet and flees for his life from his tribal brethren. In the forest he finds a large horse’s head lying under a tree. It bids him creep into its left ear; and he becomes so small as to do it easily. ”

“ Every time the tale is passed through the memory it is exposed to the risk of variation, not only in its main lines, but also, and still more, in its details. Hence we can speak of the story embodied in the Perseus cycle as an abstract ideal whole with even less propriety than we can, by eliminating individual peculiarities from the entire series of pictures of the Annunciation, or the Marriage of the Virgin, from the earliest to the latest, speak of the scene they present with so many variations as one abstract ideal whole. ”