The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning, by John Thackray Bunce This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning Author: John Thackray Bunce Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8226] Last Updated: February 1, 2013 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAIRY TALES *** Produced by David Deley and David Widger
"Let me not, O Varuna, enter into the house of clay.
Have mercy! Almighty, have mercy!
If I go trembling, like a cloud driven by the wind,
Have mercy! Almighty, have mercy!
Through want of strength, thou strong and bright God,
have I gone wrong;
Have mercy! Almighty, have mercy!"
But, besides Dyaus pitar, or Varuna, the Aryans worshipped other gods,
whom they made for themselves out of the elements, and the changes of
night and day, and the succession of the seasons. They worshipped the sky,
the earth, the sun, the dawn, fire, water, and wind. The chief of these
deities were Agni, the fire; Prithivi, the earth; Ushas, the dawn; Mitra,
or Surya, the sun; Indra, the sky; Maruts, the storm-winds; and Varuna,
the All-Surrounder. To these deities sacrifice was offered and prayer
addressed; but they had no priests or temples—these came in later
ages, when men thought they had need of others to stand between them and
God. But the ancient Aryans saw the Deity everywhere, and stood
face to face with Him in Nature. He was to them the early morning, the
brightness of midday, the gloom of evening, the darkness of night, the
flash of the lightning, the roll of the thunder, and the rush of the
mighty storm-wind. It seems strange to us that those who could imagine the
one Heaven-Father should degrade Him by making a multitude of Gods; but
this came easily to them, partly out of a desire to account for all they
saw in Nature, and which their fancy clothed in divine forms, and partly
out of reverence for the great All Father, by filling up the space between
Him and themselves with inferior Gods, all helping to make His greatness
the greater and His power the mightier.
We cannot look into this old religion of the Aryans any further, because
our business is to see how their legends are connected with the myths and
stories which are spread by their descendants over a great part of East
and West. Now this came about in the way we are going to describe.
The mind of the Aryan peoples in their ancient home was full of
imagination. They never ceased to wonder at what they heard and saw in the
sky and upon the earth. Their language was highly figurative, and so the
things which struck them with wonder, and which they could not explain,
were described under forms and names which were familiar to them. Thus the
thunder was to them the bellowing of a mighty beast or the rolling of a
great chariot. In the lightning they saw a brilliant serpent, or a spear
shot across the sky, or a great fish darting swiftly through the sea of
cloud. The clouds were heavenly cows, who shed milk upon the earth and
refreshed it; or they were webs woven by heavenly women, who drew water
from the fountains on high and poured it down as rain. The sun was a
radiant wheel, or a golden bird, or an eye, or a shining egg, or a horse
of matchless speed, or a slayer of the cloud-dragons. Sometimes it was a
frog, when it seemed to be sinking into or squatting upon the water; and
out of this fancy, when the meaning of it was lost, there grew a Sanskrit
legend, which is to be found also in Teutonic and Celtic myths. This story
is, that Bheki (the frog) was a lovely maiden who was found by a king, who
asked her to be his wife. So she married him, but only on condition that
he should never show her a drop of water. One day she grew tired, and
asked for water. The king gave it to her, and she sank out of his sight;
in other words, the sun disappears when it touches the water.
This imagery of the Aryans was applied by them to all they saw in the sky.
Sometimes, as we have said, the clouds were cows; they were also dragons,
which sought to slay the sun; or great ships floating across the sky, and
casting anchor upon earth; or rocks, or mountains, or deep caverns, in
which evil deities hid the golden light. Then, also, they were shaped by
fancy into animals of various kinds-the bear, the wolf, the dog, the ox;
and into giant birds, and into monsters which were both bird and beast.
The Winds, again, in their fancy, were the companions or the ministers of
Indra, the sky-god. The Maruts, or spirits of the winds, gathered into
their host the souls of the dead—thus giving birth to the
Scandinavian and Teutonic legend of the Wild Horseman, who rides at
midnight through the stormy sky, with his long train of dead behind him,
and his weird hounds before. The Ribhus, or Arbhus, again, were the
sunbeams or the lightning, who forged the armour of the Gods, and made
their thunderbolts, and turned old people young, and restored out of the
hide alone the slaughtered cow on which the Gods had feasted. Out of these
heavenly artificers, the workers of the clouds, there came, in later
times, two of the most striking stories of ancient legend—that of
Thor, the Scandinavian thunder-god, who feasted at night on the goats
which drew his chariot, and in the morning, by a touch of his hammer,
brought them back to life; and that of Orpheus in the beautiful Greek
legend, the master of divine song, who moved the streams, and rocks, and
trees, by the beauty of his music, and brought back his wife Eurydike from
the shades of death. In our Western fairy tales we still have these
Ribhus, or Arbhus, transformed, through various changes of language, into
Albs, and Elfen, and last into our English Elves. It is not needful to go
further into the fanciful way in which the old Aryans slowly made
ever-increasing deities and superhuman beings for themselves out of all
the forms and aspects of Nature; or how their Hindu and Persian and Greek
and Teuton descendants peopled all earth, and air, and sky, and water,
with good and bad spirits and imaginary powers. But, as we shall see
later, all these creatures grew out of one thing only—the Sun, and
his influence upon the earth. Aryan myths were no more than poetic fancies
about light and darkness, cloud and rain, night and day, storm and wind;
and when they moved westward and southward, the Aryan races brought these
legends with them; and they were shaped by degrees into the innumerable
gods and demons of the Hindus, the divs and jinns of the Persians, the
great gods, the minor deities, and nymphs, and fauns, and satyrs of Greek
mythology and poetry; the stormy divinities, the giants, and trolls of the
cold and rugged North; the dwarfs of the German forests; the elves who
dance merrily in the moonlight of an English summer; and the "good people"
who play mischievous tricks upon stray peasants amongst the Irish hills.
Almost all, indeed, that we have of a legendary kind comes to us from our
Aryan forefathers; sometimes scarcely changed, sometimes so altered that
we have to puzzle out the links between the old and the new; but all these
myths and traditions, and Old-world stories, when we come to know the
meaning of them, take us back to the time when the Aryan races dwelt
together in the high lands of Central Asia, and they all mean the same
things—that is, the relation between the sun and the earth, the
succession of night and day, of winter and summer, of storm and calm, of
cloud and tempest, and golden sunshine and bright blue sky. And this is
the source from which we get our Fairy Stories; for underneath all of them
there are the same fanciful meanings, only changed and altered in the way
of putting them, by the lapse of ages of time, by the circumstances of
different countries, and by the fancy of those who kept the wonderful
tales alive without knowing what they meant.
When the change happened that brought about all this, we do not know. It
was thousands of years ago that the Aryan people began their march out of
their old country in mid-Asia. But from the remains of their language and
the likeness of their legends to those amongst other nations, we do know
that ages and ages ago their country grew too small for them, so they were
obliged to move away from it. They could not go eastward, for the great
mountains shut them in; they could not go northward, for the great desert
was too barren for their flocks and herds. So they turned, some of them
southward into India and Persia, and some of them westward into Europe—at
the time, perhaps, when the land of Europe stretched from the borders of
Asia to our own islands, and when there was no sea between us and what is
now the mainland. How they made their long and toilsome march we know not.
But, as Kingsley writes of such a movement of an ancient tribe, so we may
fancy these old Aryans marching westward—"the tall, bare-limbed men,
with stone axes on their shoulders and horn bows at their backs, with
herds of grey cattle, guarded by huge lop-eared mastiffs, with shaggy
white horses, heavy-horned sheep and silky goats, moving always westward
through the boundless steppes, whither or why we know not, but that the
All-Father had sent them forth. And behind us [he makes them say] the rosy
snow-peaks died into ghastly grey, lower and lower, as every evening came;
and before us the plains spread infinite, with gleaming salt-lakes, and
ever-fresh tribes of gaudy flowers. Behind us, dark: lines of living
beings streamed down the mountain slopes; around us, dark lines crawled
along the plains—westward, westward ever. Who could stand against
us? We met the wild asses on the steppe, and tamed them, and made them our
slaves. We slew the bison herds, and swam broad rivers on their skins. The
Python snake lay across our path; the wolves and wild dogs snarled at us
out of their coverts; we slew them and went on. The forests rose in black
tangled barriers, we hewed our way through them and went on. Strange giant
tribes met us, and eagle-visaged hordes, fierce and foolish; we smote
them, hip and thigh, and went on, west-ward ever." And so, as they went
on, straight towards the west, or as they turned north and south, and thus
overspread new lands, they brought with them their old ways of thought and
forms of belief, and the stories in which these had taken form; and on
these were built up the Gods and Heroes, and all wonder-working creatures
and things, and the poetical fables and fancies which have come down to
us, and which still linger in our customs and our Fairy Tales bright and
sunny and many coloured in the warm regions of the south; sterner and
wilder and rougher in the north; more homelike in the middle and western
countries; but always alike in their main features, and always having the
same meaning when we come to dig it out; and these forms and this meaning
being the same in the lands of the Western Aryans as in those still
peopled by the Aryans of the East.
It would take a very great book to give many examples of the myths and
stories which are alike in all the Aryan countries; but we may see by one
instance what the likeness is; and it shall be a story which all will know
when they read it.
Once upon a time there was a Hindu Rajah, who had an only daughter, who
was born with a golden necklace. In this necklace was her soul; and if the
necklace were taken off and worn by some one else, the Princess would die.
On one of her birthdays the Rajah gave his daughter a pair of slippers
with ornaments of gold and gems upon them. The Princess went out upon a
mountain to pluck the flowers that grew there, and while she was stooping
to pluck them one of her slippers came off and fell down into a forest
below. A Prince, who was hunting in the forest, picked up the lost
slipper, and was so charmed with it that he desired to make its owner his
wife. So he made his wish known everywhere, but nobody came to claim the
slipper, and the poor Prince grew very sad. At last some people from the
Rajah's country heard of it, and told the Prince where to find the Rajah's
daughter; and he went there, and asked for her as his wife, and they were
married. Sometime after, another wife of the Prince, being jealous of the
Rajah's daughter, stole her necklace, and put it on her own neck, and then
the Rajah's daughter died. But her body did not decay, nor did her face
lose its bloom; and the Prince went every day to see her, for he loved her
very much although she was dead. Then he found out the secret of the
necklace, and got it back again, and put it on his dead wife's neck, and
her soul was born again in her, and she came back to life, and they lived
happy ever after.
This Hindu story of the lost slipper is met with again in a legend of the
ancient Greeks, which tells that while a beautiful woman, named Rhodope—or
the rosy-cheeked—was bathing, an eagle picked up one of her slippers
and flew away with it, and carried it off to Egypt, and dropped it in the
lap of the King of that country, as he sat at Memphis on the
judgment-seat. The slipper was so small and beautiful that the King fell
in love with the wearer of it, and had her sought for, and when she was
found he made her his wife. Another story of the same kind. It is found in
many countries, in various forms, and is that of Cinderella, the poor
neglected maiden, whom her stepmother set to work in the kitchen, while
her sisters went to the grand balls and feasts at the King's palace. You
know how Cinderella's fairy godmother came and dressed her like a
princess, and sent her to the ball; how the King's son fell in love with
her; how she lost one of her slippers, which the Prince picked up; how he
vowed that he would marry the maiden who could fit on the lost slipper;
how all the ladies of the court tried to do it, and failed, Cinderella's
sisters amongst them; and how Cinderella herself put on the slipper,
produced the fellow to it, was married to the King's son, and lived
happily with him.
Now the story of Cinderella helps us to find out the meaning of our Fairy
Tales; and takes us back straight to the far-off land where fairy legends
began, and to the people who made them. Cinderella, and Rhodope, and the
Hindu Rajah's daughter, and the like, are but different forms of the same
ancient myth. It is the story of the Sun and the Dawn. Cinderella, grey
and dark, and dull, is all neglected when she is away from the Sun,
obscured by the envious Clouds her sisters, and by her stepmother the
Night. So she is Aurora, the Dawn, and the fairy Prince is the Morning
Sun, ever pursuing her, to claim her for his bride. This is the legend as
we find it in the ancient Hindu sacred books; and this explains at once
the source and the meaning of the Fairy Tale.
Nor is it in the story of Cinderella alone that we trace the ancient Hindu
legends. There is scarcely a tale of Greek or Roman mythology, no legend
of Teutonic or Celtic or Scandinavian growth, no great romance of what we
call the middle ages, no fairy story taken down from the lips of ancient
folk, and dressed for us in modern shape and tongue, that we do not find,
in some form or another, in these Eastern poems. The Greek gods are there—Zeus,
the Heaven-Father, and his wife Hera, "and Phoebus Apollo the Sun-god, and
Pallas Athene, who taught men wisdom and useful arts, and Aphrodite the
Queen of Beauty, and Poseidon the Ruler of the Sea, and Hephaistos the
King of the Fire, who taught men to work in metals."[2] There, too, are legends
which resemble those of Orpheus and Eurydike, of Eros and Psyche, of Jason
and the Golden Fleece, of the labours of Herakles, of Sigurd and Brynhilt,
of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. There, too, in forms which
can be traced with ease, we have the stories of Fairyland—the germs
of the Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights, the narratives of
giants, and dwarfs, and enchanters; of men and maidens transformed by
magic arts into beasts and birds; of riches hidden in the caves and bowels
of the earth, and guarded by trolls and gnomes; of blessed lands where all
is bright and sunny, and where there is neither work nor care. Whatever,
indeed, is strange or fanciful, or takes us straight from our grey,
hard-working world into the sweet and peaceful country of Once Upon a
Time, is to be found in these ancient Hindu books, and is repeated, from
the source whence they were drawn, in many countries of the East and West;
for the people whose traditions the Vedas record were the forefathers of
those who now dwell in India, in Persia, in the border-lands, and in most
parts of Europe. Yes; strange as it may seem, all of us, who differ so
much in language, in looks in customs and ways of thought, in all that
marks out one nation from another—all of us have a common origin and
a common kindred. Greek and Roman, and Teuton and Kelt and Slav, ancient
and modern, all came from the same stock. English and French, Spanish and
Germans, Italians and Russians, all unlike in outward show, are linked
together in race; and not only with each other, but also claim kindred
with the people who now fill the fiery plains of India, and dwell on the
banks of her mighty rivers, and on the slopes of her great
mountain-chains, and who still recite the sacred books, and sing the
ancient hymns from which the mythology of the West is in great part
derived, whence our folk-lore comes, and which give life and colour and
meaning to our legends of romance and our Tales of Fairyland.
By taking a number of stories containing the same idea, but related in
different ages and in countries far away from each other, we shall see how
this likeness of popular tradition runs through all of them, and shows
their common origin. So we will go to the next chapter, and tell a few
kindred tales from East and West, and South and North.
"The island-valley of Avilion,
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns,
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea."
Now it is plain that we cannot speak of all these dwellers in Fairyland;
but we can only pick out a few here and there, and those of you who want
to know more must go to the books that tell of them. As to me, who have
undertaken to tell something of these wonders, I feel very much like the
poor boy in the little German story of "The Golden Key." Do you know the
story? If you don't, I will tell it you. "One winter, when a deep snow was
lying on the ground, a poor boy had to go out in a sledge to fetch wood.
When he had got enough he thought he would make a fire to warm himself,
for his limbs were quite frozen. So he swept the snow away and made a
clear space, and there he found a golden key. Then he began to think that
where there was a key there must also be a lock; and digging in the earth
he found a small iron chest. 'I hope the key will fit,' lie said to
himself, 'for there must certainly be great treasures in this box.' After
looking all round the box he found a little keyhole, and to his great joy,
the golden key fitted it exactly. Then he turned the key once round"—and
now we must wait till he has quite unlocked it and lifted the lid up, and
then we shall learn what wonderful treasures were in the chest. This is
all that this book can do for you. It can give you the golden key, and
show you where the chest is to be found, and then you must unlock it for
yourselves.
Where shall we begin our hasty journey into Wonderland? Suppose we take a
glance at those famous Hindu demons, the Rakshas, who are the originals of
all the ogres and giants of our nursery tales? Now the Rakshas were very
terrible creatures indeed, and in the minds of many people in India are so
still, for they are believed in even now. Their natural form, so the
stories say, is that of huge, unshapely giants, like clouds, with hair and
beard of the colour of the red lightning; but they can take any form they
please, to deceive those whom they wish to devour, for their great
delight, like that of the ogres, is to kill all they meet, and to eat the
flesh of those whom they kill. Often they appear as hunters, of monstrous
size, with tusks instead of teeth, and with horns on their heads, and all
kinds of grotesque and frightful weapons and ornaments. They are very
strong, and make themselves stronger by various arts of magic; and they
are strongest of all at nightfall, when they are supposed to roam about
the jungles, to enter the tombs, and even to make their way into the
cities, and carry off their victims. But the Rakshas are not alone like
ogres in their cruelty, but also in their fondness for money, and for
precious stones, which they get together in great quantities and conceal
in their palaces; for some of them are kings of their species, and have
thousands upon thousands of inferior Rakshas under their command. But
while they are so numerous and so powerful, the Rakshas, like all the
ogres and giants in Fairyland, are also very stupid, and are easily
outwitted by clever people. There are many Hindu stories which are told to
show this. I will tell you one of them.[7] Two little Princesses were
badly treated at home, and so they ran away into a great forest, where
they found a palace belonging to a Rakshas, who had gone out. So they went
into the house and feasted, and swept the rooms, and made everything neat
and tidy. Just as they had done this, the Rakshas and his wife came home,
and the two Princesses ran up to the top of the house, and hid themselves
on the flat roof. When the Rakshas got indoors he said to his wife:
﹃Somebody has been making everything clean and tidy. Wife, did you do
this?﹄"No," she said; "I don't know who can have done it."﹃Some one has
been sweeping the court-yard,﹄said the Rakshas.﹃Wife, did you sweep the
court-yard?﹄"No," she answered; "I did not do it." Then the Rakshas
walked round and round several times, with his nose up in the air, saying,
"Some one is here now; I smell flesh and blood. Where can they be?"﹃Stuff
and nonsense!﹄cried the Rakshas' wife.﹃You smell flesh and blood,
indeed! Why, you have just been killing and eating a hundred thousand
people. I should wonder if you didn't still smell flesh and blood!﹄They
went on disputing, till at last the Rakshas gave it up. "Never mind," lie
said;﹃I don't know how it is—I am very thirsty: let's come and
drink some water.﹄So they went to the well, and began letting down jars
into it, and drawing them up, and drinking the water. Then the elder of
the two Princesses, who was very bold and wise, said to her sister,﹃I
will do something that will be very good for us both.﹄So she ran quickly
down stairs, and crept close behind the Rakshas and his wife, as they
stood on tip-toe more than half over the side of the well, and catching
hold of one of the Rakshas' heels, and one of his wife's, she gave each a
little push, and down they both tumbled into the well, and were drowned—the
Rakshas and the Rakshas' wife. The Princess then went back to her sister,
and said, "I have killed the Rakshas!" "What, both?" cried her sister.
"Yes, both," she said. "Won't they come back?" said her sister.﹃No,
never,﹄answered she.
This, you see, is something like the story of the Little Girl and the
Three Bears, so well known amongst our Nursery Tales.
Another story will show you how stupid a Rakshas is, and how easily he can
be outwitted.[8]
Once upon a time a Blind Man and a Deaf Man made an agreement. The Blind
Man was to hear for the Deaf Man; and the Deaf Man was to see for the
Blind Man; and so they were to go about on their travels together. One day
they went to a nautch—that is, a singing and dancing exhibition. The
Deaf Man said,﹃The dancing is very good; but the music is not worth
listening to.﹄"I do not agree with you," the Blind Man said;﹃I think the
music is very good; but the dancing is not worth looking at.﹄So they went
away for a walk in the jungle. On the way they found a donkey, belonging
to a dhobee, or washerman, and a big chattee, or iron pot, which the
washerman used to boil clothes in. "Brother," said the Deaf Man,﹃here is
a donkey and a chattee; let us take them with us, they may be useful.﹄So
they took them, and went on. Presently they came to an ants' nest. "Here,"
said the Deaf Man,﹃are a number of very fine black ants; let us take some
of them to show our friends.﹄"Yes," said the Blind Man,﹃they will do as
presents to our friends.﹄So the Deaf Man took out a silver box from his
pocket, and put several of the black ants into it. After a time a terrible
storm came on. "Oh dear!" cried the Deaf Man,﹃how dreadful this lightning
is! let us get to some place of shelter.﹄"I don't see that it's dreadful
at all," said the Blind Man,﹃but the thunder is terrible; let us get
under shelter.﹄So they went up to a building that looked like a temple,
and went in, and took the donkey and the big pot and the black ants with
them. But it was not a temple, it was the house of a powerful Rakshas, and
the Rakshas came home as soon as they had got inside and had fastened the
door. Finding that he couldn't get in, he began to make a great noise,
louder than the thunder, and he beat upon the door with his great fists.
Now the Deaf Man looked through a chink, and saw him, and was very
frightened, for the Rakshas was dreadful to look at. But the Blind Man, as
he couldn't see, was very brave; and he went to the door and called out,
﹃Who are you? and what do you mean by coming here and battering at the
door in this way, and at this time of night?﹄"I'm a Rakshas," he
answered, in a rage;﹃and this is my house, and if you don't let me in I
will kill you.﹄Then the Blind Man called out in reply,﹃Oh! you're a
Rakshas, are you? Well, if you're Rakshas, I'm Bakshas, and Bakshas is as
good as Rakshas.﹄"What nonsense is this?" cried the monster;﹃there is no
such creature as a Bakshas.﹄"Go away," replied the Blind Man, "if you
make any further disturbance I'll punish you; for know that I am
Bakshas, and Bakshas is Rakshas' father." "Heavens and earth!" cried the
Rakshas, "I never heard such an extraordinary thing in my life. But if you
are my father, let me see your face,"—for he began to get puzzled
and frightened, as the person inside was so very positive. Now the Blind
Man and the Deaf Man didn't quite know what to do; but at last they opened
the door just a little, and poked the donkey's nose out. "Bless me,"
thought the Rakshas,﹃what a terribly ugly face my father Bakshas has
got.﹄Then he called out again﹃O! father Bakshas, you have a very big
fierce face, but people have sometimes very big heads and very little
bodies; let me see you, body and head, before I go away.﹄Then the Blind
Man and the Deaf Man rolled the great iron pot across the floor with a
thundering noise; and the Rakshas, who watched the chink of the door very
carefully, said to himself,﹃He has got a great body as well, so I had
better go away.﹄But he was still doubtful; so he said,﹃Before I go away
let me hear you scream,﹄for all the tribe of the Rakshas scream
dreadfully. Then the Blind Man and the Deaf Man took two of the black ants
out of the box, and put one into each of the donkey's ears, and the ants
bit the donkey, and the donkey began to bray and to bellow as loud as he
could; and then the Rakshas ran away quite frightened.
In the morning the Blind Man and the Deaf Man found that the floor of the
house was covered with heaps of gold, and silver, and precious stones; and
they made four great bundles of the treasure, and took one each, and put
the other two on the donkey, and off they went, But the Rakshas was
waiting some distance off to see what his father Bakshas was like by
daylight; and he was very angry when he saw only a Deaf Man, and a Blind
Man, and a big iron pot, and a donkey, all loaded with his gold and
silver. So he ran off and fetched six of his friends to help him, and each
of the six had hair a yard long, and tusks like an elephant. When the
Blind Man and the Deaf Man saw them coming they went and hid the treasure
in the bushes, and then they got up into a lofty betel palm and waited—the
Deaf Man, because he could see, getting up first, to be furthest out of
harm's way. Now the seven Rakshas were not able to reach them, and so they
said, "Let us get on each other's shoulders and pull them down." So one
Rakshas stooped down, and the second got on his shoulders, and the third
on his, and the fourth on his, and the fifth on his, and the sixth on his,
and the seventh—the one who had invited the others—was just
climbing up, when the Deaf Man got frightened and caught hold of the Blind
Man's arm, and as he was sitting quite at ease, not knowing that they were
so close, the Blind Man was upset, and tumbled down on the neck of the
seventh Rakshas. The Blind Man thought he had fallen into the branches of
another tree, and stretching out his hands for something to take hold of,
he seized the Rakshas' two great ears and pinched them very hard. This
frightened the Rakshas, who lost his balance and fell down to the ground,
upsetting the other six of his friends; the Blind Man all the while
pinching harder than ever, and the Deaf Man crying out from the top of the
tree—"You're all right, brother, hold on tight, I'm coming down to
help you"—though he really didn't mean to do anything of the kind.
Well, the noise, and the pinching, and all the confusion, so frightened
the six Rakshas that they thought they had had enough of helping their
friend, and so they ran away; and the seventh Rakshas, thinking that
because they ran there must be great danger, shook off the Blind Man and
ran away too. And then the Deaf Man came down from the tree and embraced
the Blind Man, and said, "I could not have done better myself." Then the
Deaf Man divided the treasure; one great heap for himself, and one little
heap for the Blind Man. But the Blind Man felt his heap and then felt the
other, and then, being angry at the cheat, he gave the Deaf Man a box on
the ear, so tremendous that it made the Deaf Man hear. And the Deaf Man,
also being angry, gave the other such a blow in the face that it made the
Blind Man see. So they became good friends directly, and divided the
treasure into equal shares, and went home laughing at the stupid Rakshas.
From the legends of India we now go on to Persia and Arabia, to learn
something about the Divs and the Peris, and the Jinns. When the ancient
Persians separated from the Aryan race from which they sprang, they
altered their religion as well as changed their country. They came to
believe in two principal gods, Ormuzd, the spirit of goodness, who sits
enthroned in the Realms of Light, with great numbers of angels around him;
and Ahriman, the spirit of evil, who reigns in the Realms of Darkness and
Fire, and round whose throne are the great six arch-Divs, and vast numbers
of inferior Divs, or evil beings; and these two powers are always at war
with each other, and are always trying to obtain the government of the
world. From Ormuzd and Ahriman there came in time, according to popular
fancy, the two races of the Divs and the Peris, creatures who were like
mankind in some things, but who had great powers of magic; which made them
visible and invisible at pleasure, enabled them to change their shapes
when they pleased, and to move about on the earth or in the air. They
dwelt in the land of Jinnestan, in the mountains of Kaf. These mountains
were supposed to go round the earth like a ring; they were thousands of
miles in height, and they were made of the precious stone called
chrysolite, which is of a green colour, and this colour, so the Persian
poets say, is reflected in the green which we sometimes see in the sky at
sunset. In this land of Jinnestan there are many cities. The Peris have
for their abode the kingdom of Shad-u-Kan, that is, of Pleasure and
Delight, with its capital Juber-a-bad, or the Jewel City; and the Divs
have for their dwelling Ahermambad, or Ahriman's city, in which there are
enchanted castles and palaces, guarded by terrible monsters and powerful
magicians. The Peris are very beautiful beings, usually represented as
women with wings, and charming robes of all colours. The Divs are painted
as demons of the most frightful kind. One of them, a very famous one named
Berkhyas, is described as being a mountain in size, his face black, his
body covered with hair, his neck like that of a dragon; two boar's tusks
proceed from his mouth, his eyes are wells of blood, his hair bristles
like needles, and is so thick and long that pigeons make their nests in
it. Between the Peris and the Divs there was always war; but the Divs were
too powerful for the Peris, and used to capture them and hang them in iron
cages from the tree-tops, where their companions came and fed them with
perfumes, of which the Peris are very fond, and which the Divs very much
dislike, so that the smell kept the evil spirits away. Sometimes the Peris
used to call in the help of men against the Divs; and in the older Persian
stories there are many tales of the wonders done by these heroes who
fought against the Divs. The most famous of these were called Tamuras and
Rustem. Tamuras conquered so many of the evil spirits that he was called
the Div-binder. He began his fights in this way. He was a great king,
whose help both sides wished to get. So the Peris sent a splendid embassy
to him, and so did the Divs. Tamuras did not know what to do; so he went
to consult a wonderful bird, called the Simurg, who speaks all tongues,
and who knows everything that has happened, or that will happen. The
Simurg told him to fight for the Peris. Then the Simurg gave him three
feathers from her own breast, and also the magic shield of Jan-ibn-Jan,
the Suleiman or King of the Jinns, and then she carried him on her back
into the country of Jinnestan, where he fought with and conquered the king
of the Divs. The account of this battle is given at great length in the
Persian romance poems. Then Tamuras conquered another Div, named Demrush,
who lived in a gloomy cavern, where he kept in prison the Peri Merjan, or
the Pearl, a beautiful fairy, whom Tamuras set free. Rustem, however, is
the great hero of Persian romance, and the greatest defender of the Peris.
His adventures, as told by the Persian poets, would make a very large
book, so that we cannot attempt to describe them. But there are two
stories of him which may be told. One night, while he lay sleeping under a
rock, a Div, named Asdiv, took the form of a dragon, and came upon him
suddenly. Rustem's horse, Reksh, who had magic powers, knew the Div in
this disguise, and awakened his master twice, at which Rustem was angry,
and tried to kill the horse for disturbing him. Reksh, however, awakened
him the third time, and then Rustem saw the Div, and slew him after a
fearful combat. The other story is this. There came a wild ass of enormous
size, with a skin like the sun, and a black stripe along his back, and
this creature got amongst the king's horses and killed them. Now the wild
ass was no other than a very powerful Div, named Akvan, who haunted a
particular fountain or spring. So Rustem, mounted on his horse Reksh, went
to look for him there. Three days he waited, but saw nothing. On the
fourth day the Div appeared, and Rustem tried to throw a noose over his
head, but the Div suddenly vanished. Then he reappeared, and Rustem shot
an arrow at him, but he vanished again. Rustem then turned his horse to
graze, and laid himself down by the spring to sleep. This was what the
cunning Akvan wanted, and while Rustem was asleep, Akvan seized him, and
flew high up into the air with him. Then Rustem awoke, and the Div gave
him his choice of being dropped from the sky into the sea, or upon the
mountains. Rustem knew that if he fell upon the mountains he would be
dashed in pieces, so he secretly chose to fall into the sea; but he did
not say so to the Div. On the contrary, he pretended not to know what to
do, but he said he feared the sea, because those who were drowned could
not enter into Paradise. On hearing this, the Div at once dropped Rustern
into the sea—which was what he wanted—and then went back to
his fountain. But when he got there, he found that Rustem had got ashore,
and was also at the fountain, and then they fought again and the Div was
killed. After this Rustem had a son named Zohrab, about whom many
wonderful things are told; and it so happened that Rustem and his son
Zohrab came to fight each other without knowing one another; and Rustem
was killed, and while dying he slew his son. Now all these stories mean
the same thing: they are only the old Aryan Sun-myths put into another
form by the poets and story-tellers: the Peris are the rays of the sun, or
the morning or evening Aurora; the Divs are the black clouds of night; the
hero is the sun who conquers them, and binds them in the realms of
darkness; and the death of Rustem is the sunset—Zohrab, his son,
being either the moon or the rising sun.
But now we must leave the Peris and the Divs, and look at the jinns, of
the Arabian stories. These also dwell in the mysterious country of
Jinnestan, and in the wonderful mountains of Kaf; but they likewise spread
themselves all through the earth, and they specially liked to live in
ruined houses, or in tombs; on the sea shore, by the banks of rivers, and
at the meeting of cross-roads. Sometimes, too, they were found in deep
forests, and many travellers are supposed to find them in desolate
mountain places. Even to this day they are firmly believed in by Arabs,
and also by people in different parts of Persia and India. In outward
form, in their natural shape, they resembled the Peris and the Divs of the
ancient Persians, and they were divided into good and bad: the good ones
very beautiful and shining; the bad ones deformed, black, and ugly, and
sometimes as big as giants. They did not, however, always appear in their
own forms, for they could take the shape of any animal, especially of
serpents, and cats and dogs. They were governed by chief spirits or kings;
and over all, good and bad alike, there were set a succession of powerful
monarchs, named Suleiman, or Solomon, seventy-two in number—the last
of whom, and the greatest, Jan-ibn-Jan, is said by Arabian story-tellers
to have built the pyramids of Egypt. There is an old tradition that the
shield of Jan-ibn-Jan, which was a talisman of magic power, was brought
from Egypt to King Solomon the Wise, the son of King David, and that it
gave him power over all the tribes of the Jinns, and this is why, in the
common stories about them, the Jinns are made to call upon the name of
Solomon.
The Jinns, according to Arabian tradition, lived upon the earth thousands
of years before man was created. They were made, the Koran says, of﹃the
smokeless fire,﹄that is, the hot breath of the desert wind, Simoon. But
they became disobedient, and prophets were sent to warn them. They would
not obey the prophets, and angels were then sent to punish them. The
angels drove them out of Jinnestan into the islands of the seas, killed
some, and shut some of them up in prison. Among the prisoners was a young
Jinns, named Iblees, whose name means Despair; and when Adam was created,
God commanded the angels and the Jinns to do him reverence, and they all
obeyed but Iblees, who was then turned into a Shaitan, or devil, and
became the father of all the Shaitan tribe, the mortal enemies of mankind.
Since their dispersion the Jinns are not immortal; they are to live longer
than man, but they must die before the general resurrection. Some of them
are killed by other Jinns, some can be slain by man, and some are
destroyed by shooting stars sent from heaven. When they receive a mortal
wound, the fire which burns in their veins breaks forth and burns them
into ashes.
Such are the Arab fancies about the Jinns. The meaning of them is clear,
for the Jinns are the winds, derived plainly from the Ribhus and the
Maruts of the ancient Aryan myths; and they still survive in European
folk-lore in the train of Woden, or the Wild Huntsman, who sweeps at
midnight over the German forests.
Some of the stories of the Jinns are to be found in the book of the
Thousand and One Nights.
One of these stories is that of "the Fisherman and the Genie." A poor
fisherman, you remember, goes out to cast his nets; but he draws no fish,
but only, at the third cast, a vase of yellow copper, sealed with a seal
of lead. He cuts open the seal, and then there issues from the vase a
thick cloud of smoke, which rises to the sky, and spreads itself over land
and sea. Presently the smoke gathers itself together, and becomes a solid
body, taking the form of a Genie, twice as big as any of the giants; and
the Genie cries out, with a terrible voice,﹃Solomon, Solomon, great
prophet of Allah! Pardon! I will never more oppose thy will, but will obey
all thy commands.﹄At first the fisherman is very much frightened; but he
grows bolder, and tells the Genie that Solomon has been dead these
eighteen hundred years, to which the Genie answers that he means to kill
the fisherman, and tells him why. I told you just now that the Jinns
rebelled, and were punished. The Genie tells the fisherman that he is one
of these rebellious spirits, that he was taken prisoner, and brought up
for judgment before Solomon himself, and that Solomon confined him in the
copper vase, and ordered him to be thrown into the sea, and that upon the
leaden cover of the vase he put the impression of the royal seal, upon
which the name of God is engraved.
When he was thrown into the sea the Genie made three vows—each in a
period of a hundred years. I swore, he says, that﹃if any man delivered me
within the first hundred years, I would make him rich, even after his
death. In the second hundred years I swore that if any one set me free I
would discover to him all the treasures of the earth; still no help came.
In the third period, I swore to make my deliverer a most powerful monarch,
to be always at his command, and to grant him every day any three requests
he chose to make. Then, being still a prisoner, I swore that I would
without mercy kill any man who set me free, and that the only favour I
would grant him should be the manner of his death.﹄And so the Genie
proposed to kill the fisherman. Now the fisherman did not like the idea of
being killed; and he and the Genie had a long discourse about it; but the
Genie would have his own way, and the poor fisherman was going to be
killed, when he thought of a trick he might play upon the Genie. He knew
two things—first that the Jinns are obliged to answer questions put
to them in the name of Allah, or God; and also that though very powerful,
they are very stupid, and do not see when they are being led into a
pitfall. So he said, "I consent to die; but before I choose the manner of
my death, I conjure thee, by the great name of Allah, which is graven upon
the seal of the prophet Solomon, the son of David, to answer me truly a
question I am going to put to thee."
Then the Genie trembled, and said, "Ask, but make haste."
Now when he knew that the Genie would speak the truth, the Fisherman said,
"Darest thou swear by the great name of Allah that thou really wert in
that vase?"
"I swear it, by the great name of Allah," said the Genie.
But the Fisherman said he would not believe it, unless he saw it with his
own eyes. Then, being too stupid to perceive the meaning of the Fisherman,
the Genie fell into the trap. Immediately the form of the Genie began to
change into smoke, and to spread itself as before over the shore and the
sea, and then gathering itself together, it began to enter the vase, and
continued to do so, with a slow and even motion, until nothing remained
outside. Then, out of the vase there issued the voice of the Genie,
saying, "Now, thou unbeliever, art thou convinced that I am in the vase?"
But instead of answering, the Fisherman quickly took up the leaden cover,
and put it on the vase; and then he cried out, "O, Genie! it is now thy
turn to ask pardon, and to choose the sort of death thou wilt have; or I
will again cast thee into the sea, and I will build upon the shore a house
where I will live, to warn all fishermen against a Genie so wicked as thou
art."
At this the Genie was very angry. First he tried to get out of the vase;
but the seal of Solomon kept him fast shut up. Then he pretended that he
was but making a jest of the Fisherman when he threatened to kill him.
Then he begged and prayed to be released; but the Fisherman only mocked
him. Next he promised that if set at liberty, he would make the Fisherman
rich. To this the Fisherman replied by telling him a long story of how a
physician who cured a king was murdered instead of being rewarded, and of
how he revenged himself. And then he preached a little sermon to the Genie
on the sin of ingratitude, which only caused the Genie to cry out all the
more to be set free. But still the Fisherman would not consent, and so to
induce him the Genie offered to tell him a story, to which the Fisherman
was quite ready to listen; but the Genie said,﹃Dost thou think I am in
the humour, shut up in this narrow prison, to tell stories? I will tell
thee as many as thou wilt if thou wilt let me out.﹄But the Fisherman only
answered, "No, I will cast thee into the sea."
At last they struck a bargain, the Genie swearing by Allah that he would
make the Fisherman rich, and then the Fisherman cut the seal again, and
the Genie came out of the vase. The first thing he did when he got out was
to kick the vase into the sea, which frightened the Fisherman, who began
to beg and pray for his life. But the Genie kept his word; and took him
past the city, over a mountain and over a vast plain, to a little lake
between four hills, where he caught four little fish, of different colours—white,
red, blue, and yellow—which the Genie bade him carry to the Sultan,
who would give him more money than he had ever seen in his life. And then,
the story says, he struck his foot against the ground, which opened, and
he disappeared, the earth closing over him.
Another story is that of the Genie Maimoun, the son of Dimdim, who took
prisoner a young Prince, and conveyed him to an enchanted palace, and
changed him into the form of an ape, and the ape got on board a ship, and
was carried to the country of a great Sultan, and when the Sultan heard
that there was an ape who could write beautiful poems, he sent for him to
the palace, and they had dinner together, and they played at chess
afterwards, the ape behaving in all respects like a man, excepting that he
could not speak. Then the Sultan sent for his daughter, the Queen of
Beauty, to see this great wonder. But when the Queen of Beauty came into
the room she was very angry with her father for showing her to a man, for
the Princess was a great magician, and thus she knew that it was a man
turned into an ape, and she told her father that the change had been made
by a powerful Genie, the son of the daughter of Eblis. So the Sultan
ordered the Queen of Beauty to disenchant the Prince, and then she should
have him for her husband. On this the Queen of Beauty went to her chamber,
and came back with a knife, with Hebrew characters engraved upon the
blade. And then she went into the middle of the court and drew a large
circle in it, and in the centre she traced several words in Arabic
letters, and others in Egyptian letters. Then putting herself in the
middle of the circle, she repeated several verses of the Koran. By degrees
the air was darkened, as if night were coming on, and the whole world
seemed to be vanishing. And in the midst of the darkness the Genie, the
son of the daughter of Eblis, appeared in the shape of a huge, terrible
lion, which ran at the Princess as if to devour her. But she sprang back,
and plucked out a hair from her head, and then, pronouncing two or three
words, she changed the hair into a sharp scythe, and with the scythe she
cut the lion into two pieces through the middle. The body of the lion now
vanished, and only the head remained. This changed itself into a large
scorpion. The Princess changed herself into a serpent and attacked the
scorpion, which then changed into an eagle, and flew away; and the serpent
changed itself into a fierce black eagle, larger and more powerful and
flew after it. Soon after the eagles had vanished the earth opened, and a
great black and white cat appeared, mewing and crying out terribly, and
with its hairs standing straight on end. A black wolf followed the cat,
and attacked it. Then the cat changed into a worm, which buried itself in
a pomegranate that had fallen from a tree over-hanging the tank in the
court, and the pomegranate began to swell until it became as large as a
gourd, which then rose into the air, rolled backwards and forwards several
times, and then fell into the court and broke into a thousand pieces. The
wolf now transformed itself into a cock, and ran as fast as possible, and
ate up the pomegranate seeds. But one of them fell into the tank and
changed into a little fish. On this the cock changed itself into a pike,
darted into the water, and pursued the little fish. Then comes the end of
the story, which is told by the Prince transformed into the Ape:—"They
were both hid hours under water, and we knew not what was become of them,
when suddenly we heard horrible cries that made us tremble. Then we saw
the Princess and the Genie all on fire. They darted flames against each
other with their breath, and at last came to a close attack. Then the fire
increased, and all was hidden in smoke and cloud, which rose to a great
height. We had other cause for terror. The Genie, breaking away from the
Princess, came towards us, and blew his flames all over us." The Princess
followed him; but she could not prevent the Sultan from having his beard
singed and his face scorched; a spark flew into the right eye of the
Ape-Prince and blinded him, and the chief of the eunuchs was killed on the
spot. Then they heard the cry of "Victory! victory!" and the Princess
appeared in her own form, and the Genie was reduced to a heap of ashes.
Unhappily the Princess herself was also fatally hurt. If she had swallowed
all the pomegranate seeds she would have conquered the Genie without harm
to herself; but one seed being lost, she was obliged to fight with flames
between earth and heaven, and she had only just time enough to disenchant
the ape and to turn him back again into his human form, when she, too,
fell to the earth, burnt to ashes.
This story is repeated in various forms in the Fairy Tales of other lands.
The hair which the Princess changed into a scythe is like the sword of
sharpness which appears in Scandinavian legends and in the tale of Jack
the Giant Killer; the transformation of the magician reminds us of the
changes of the Ogre in Puss in Boots; and the death of the Princess by
fire because she failed to eat up the last of the pomegranate seeds,
brings to mind the Greek myth of Persephone, who ate pomegranate seeds,
and so fell into the power of Aidoneus, the God of the lower regions, and
was carried down into Hades to live with him as his wife; and in many
German and Russian tales are to be found incidents like those of the
terrible battle between the Princess and the Genie Maimoun.
"On hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain, or by rushing brook,
Or by the beached margent of the sea,
To dance their ringlets to the whistling wind."
But the Fairy tribe were not the only graceful elves described by the
poets. The Germans had their Kobolds, and the Scotch their Brownies, and
the English had their Boggarts and Robin Goodfellow and Lubberkin—all
of them beings of the same description: house and farm spirits, who liked
to live amongst men, and who sometimes did hard, rough work out of
good-nature, and sometimes were spiteful and mischievous, especially to
those who teased them, or spoke of them disrespectfully, or tried to see
them when they did not wish to be seen. To the same family belongs the
Danish Nis, a house spirit of whom many curious legends are related. Robin
Goodfellow was the original of Shakspeare's Puck: his frolics are related
for us in "The Midsummer Night's Dream," where a hairy says to him—
"You are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Called Robin Goodfellow. Are you not he
That frights the maidens of the villagery,
Skims milk, and sometimes labours in the quern,
And bootless makes the breathless housewife churn;
And sometimes makes the drink to bear no harm,
Misleads night wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hob-Goblin call you, and sweet Puck;
You do their work, and they shall have good luck."
In the "Jests of Robin Goodfellow," first printed in Queen Elizabeth's
reign, the tricks which this creature is said to have played are told in
plenty. Here is one of them:—Robin went as fiddler to a wedding.
When the candles came he blew them out, and giving the men boxes on the
ears he set them fighting. He kissed the prettiest girls, and pinched the
ugly ones, till he made them scratch one another like cats. When the
posset was brought he turned himself into a bear, frightened them all
away, and had it all to himself.
The Boggart was another form of Robin Goodfellow. Stories of him are to be
found amongst Yorkshire legends, as of a creature—always invisible—who
played tricks upon the people in the houses in which he lived: shaking the
bed-curtains, rattling the doors, whistling through the keyholes,
snatching away the bread-and-butter from the children, playing pranks upon
the servants, and doing all kinds of mischief. There is a story of a
Yorkshire boggart who teased the family so much that the farmer made up
his mind to leave the house. So he packed up his goods and began to move
off. Then a neighbour came up, and said,﹃So, Georgey, you're leaving the
old house?﹄"Yes," said the farmer,﹃the boggart torments us so that we
must go.﹄Then a voice came out of a churn, saying,﹃Ay, ay, Georgey, we're
flitting, ye see.﹄"Oh!" cried the poor farmer,﹃if thou'rt with us we'll
go back again;﹄and he went back.—Mr. Tennyson puts this story into
his poem of "Walking to the Mail."
"His house, they say,
Was haunted with a jolly ghost, that shook
The curtains, whined in lobbies, tapt at doors,
And rummaged like a rat: no servant stayed:
The farmer, vext, packs up his beds and chairs,
And all his household stuff, and with his boy
Betwixt his knees, his wife upon the tilt,
Sets out, and meets a friend who hails him, 'What!
You're flitting!' 'Yes, we're flitting,' says the ghost
(For they had packed the thing among the beds).
'Oh, well,' says he, 'you flitting with us, too;
Jack, turn the horses' heads and home again.'"
The same story is told in Denmark, of a Nis—which is the same as an
English boggart, a Scotch brownie, and a German kobold—who troubled
a man very much, so that he took away his goods to a new house. All but
the last load had gone, and when they came for that, the Nis popped his
head out of a tub, and said to the man, "We're moving, you see."
The Brownies, though mischievous, like the Boggarts, were more helpful,
for they did a good deal of house-work; and would bake, and brew, and
wash, and sweep, but they would never let themselves be seen; or if any
one did manage to see them, or tried to do so, they went away. There are
stories of this kind about them in English folk-lore, in Scotch, Welsh, in
the Isle of Man, and in Germany, where they were called Kobolds. One
Kobold, of whom many accounts are given, lived in the castle of
Hudemuhler, in Luneberg, and used to talk with the people of the house,
and with visitors, and ate and drank at table, just like Leander in the
story of "The Invisible Prince;" and he used also to scour the pots and
pans, wash the dishes, and clean the tubs, and he was useful, too, in the
stable, where he curried the horses, and made them quite fat and smooth.
In return for this he had a room to himself, where he made a straw-plaited
chair, and had a little round table, and a bed and bedstead, and, where he
expected every day to find a dish of sweetened milk, with bread crumbs;
and if he did not get served in time, or if anything went wrong, he used
to beat the servants with a stick. This Kobold was named Heinzelman, and
in Grimm's collection of folklore there is a long history of him drawn up
by the minister of the parish. Another Kobold, named Hodeken, who lived
with the Bishop of Hildesheim, was usually of a kind and obliging turn of
mind, but he revenged himself on those who offended him. A scullion in the
bishop's kitchen flung dirt upon him, and Hodeken found him fast asleep
and strangled him, and put him in the pot on the fire. Then the head cook
scolded Hodeken, who in revenge squeezed toads all over the meat that was
being cooked for the bishop, and then took the cook himself and tumbled
him over the drawbridge into the moat. Then the bishop got angry, and took
bell, and book, and candle, and banished Hodeken by the form of exorcism
provided for evil spirits.
Now there are a great many other kinds of creatures in the Wonderland of
all European countries; but I must not stop to tell you about them or we
shall never have done. But there is one little story of the Danish Nis—who
answers to the German Kobold—which I may tell you, because it is
like the story of Hodeken which you have just read, and shows that the
creatures were of the same kind. There was a Nis in Jutland who was very
much teased by a mischievous boy. When the Nis had done his work he sat
down to have his supper, and he found that the boy had been playing tricks
with his porridge and made it unpleasant. So he made up his mind to be
revenged, and he did it in this way. The boy slept with a servant-man in
the loft. The Nis went up to them and took off the bed-clothes. Then,
looking at the little boy lying beside the tall man, he said,﹃Long and
short don't match,﹄and he took the boy by the legs and pulled him down to
the man's legs. This was not to his mind, however, so he went to the head
of the bed and looked at them, Then said the Nis—"Short and long
don't match," and he pulled the boy up again; and so he went on all
through the night, up and down, down and up, till the boy was punished
enough. Another Nis in Jutland went with a boy to steal corn for his
master's horses. The Nis was moderate, but the boy was covetous, and said,
"Oh, take more; we can rest now and then!" "Rest," said the Nis,﹃rest!
what is rest?﹄"Do what I tell you," replied the boy;﹃take more, and we
shall find rest when we get out of this.﹄So they took more corn, and when
they had got nearly home the boy said, "Here now is rest;" and so they sat
down on a hill-side. "If I had known," said the Nis, as they were sitting
there, "if I had known that rest was so good I'd have carried off all that
was in the barn."
Now we must leave out much more that might be said, and many stories that
might be told, about elves, and fairies, and nixes, or water spirits, and
swan maidens who become women when they lay aside their swan dresses to
bathe; and mermaids and seal maidens, who used to live in the islands of
the North seas. And we must leave out also a number of curious Scotch
tales and accounts of Welsh fairies, and stories about the good people of
the Irish legends, and the Leprechaun, a little old man who mends shoes,
and who gives you as much gold as you want if you hold him tight enough;
and there are wonderful fairy legends of Brittany, and some of Spain and
Italy, and a great many Russian and Slavonic tales which are well worth
telling, if we only had room. For the same reason we must omit the fairy
tales of ancient Greece, some of which are told so beautifully by Mr.
Kingsley in his book about the Heroes; and we must also pass by the
legends of King Arthur, and of romances of the same kind which you may
read at length in Mr. Ludlow's "Popular Epics of the Middle Ages;" and the
wonderful tales from the Norse which are told by Dr. Dasent, and in Mr.
Morris's noble poem of "Sigurd the Volsung."
But before we leave this part of Wonderland we must say something about
some kinds of beings who have not yet been mentioned—the
Scandinavian Giants and Trolls, and the German Dwarfs. The Trolls—some
of whom were Giants and some Dwarfs—were a very curious people. They
lived inside hills or mounds of earth, sometimes alone, and sometimes in
great numbers. Inside these hills, according to the stories of the common
folk, are fine houses made of gold and crystal, full of gold and jewels,
which the Trolls amuse themselves by counting. They marry and have
families; they bake and brew, and live just like human beings; and they do
not object, sometimes, to come out and talk to men and women whom they
happen to meet on the road. They are described as being friendly, and
quite ready to help those to whom they take a fancy—lending them
useful or precious things out of the hill treasures, and giving them rich
gifts. But, to balance this, they are very mischievous and thievish, and
sometimes they carry off women and children. They dislike noise. This, so
the old stories say, is because the god Thor used to fling his hammer at
them; and since he left off doing that the Trolls have suffered a great
deal from the ringing of church bells, which they very much dislike. There
are many stories about this. At a place called Ebeltoft the Trolls used to
come and steal food out of the pantries. The people consulted a Saint as
to what they were to do, and he told them to hang up a bell in the church
steeple, which they did, and then the Trolls went away. There is another
story of the same kind. A Troll lived near the town of Kund, in Sweden,
but was driven away by the church bells. Then he went over to the island
of Funen and lived in peace. But he meant to be revenged on the people of
Kund, and he tried to take his revenge in this way: He met a man from Kund—a
stranger, who did not know him—and asked the man to take a letter
into the town and to throw it into the churchyard, but he was not to take
it out of his pocket until he got there. The man received the letter, but
forgot the message, until he sat down in a meadow to rest, and then he
took out the letter to look at it. When he did so, a drop of water fell
from under the seal, then a little stream, and then quite a torrent, till
all the valley was flooded, and the man had hard work to escape. The Troll
had shut up a lake in the letter, and with this he meant to drown the
people of Kund.
Some of the Trolls are very stupid, and there are many stories as to how
they have been outwitted. One of them is very droll. A farmer ploughed a
hill-side field. Out came a Troll and said,﹃What do you mean by ploughing
up the roof of my house?﹄Then the farmer, being frightened, begged his
pardon, but said it was a pity such a fine piece of land should lie idle.
The Troll agreed to this, and then they struck a bargain that the farmer
should till the land and that each of them should share the crops. One
year the Troll was to have, for his share, what grew above ground, and the
next year what grew underground. So in the first year the farmer sowed
carrots, and the Troll had the tops; and the next year the farmer sowed
wheat, and the Troll had the roots; and the story says he was very well
content.
We can give only one more story of the Trolls. They have power over human
beings until their names are found out, and when the Troll's name is
mentioned his power goes from him. One day St. Olaf, a very great Saint,
was thinking how he could build a very large church without any money, and
he didn't quite see his way to it. Then a Giant Troll met him and they
chatted together, and St. Olaf mentioned his difficulty. So the Troll said
he would build the church, within a year, on condition that if it was done
in the time he should have for his reward the sun, and the moon, or St.
Olaf himself. The church was to be so big that seven priests could say
mass at seven altars in it without hearing each other; and it was all to
be built of flint stone and to be richly carved. When the time was nearly
up the church was finished, all but the top of the spire; and St. Olaf was
in sad trouble about his promise. So he walked out into a wood to think,
and there he heard the Troll's wife hushing her child inside a hill, and
saying to it,﹃To-morrow, Wind and Weather, your father, will come home in
the morning, and bring with him the sun and the moon, or St. Olaf
himself.﹄Then St. Olaf knew what to do. He went home, and there was the
church, all ready except the very top of the weather-cock, and the Troll
was just putting the finishing-touch to that. Then St. Olaf called out to
him, "Oh! ho! Wind and Weather, you have set the spire crooked!" And then,
with a great noise, the Troll fell down from the steeple and broke into
pieces, and every piece was a flint-stone.
The same thing is told in the German story of Rumpelstiltskin. A maiden is
ordered by a King to spin a roomful of straw into gold, or else she is to
die. A Dwarf appears, she promises him her necklace, and he does the task
for her. Next day she has to spin a larger roomful of straw into gold. She
gives the Dwarf the ring off her finger, and he does this task also. Next
day she is set to work at a larger room, and then, when the Dwarf comes,
she has nothing to give him. Then he says,﹃If you become Queen, give me
your first-born child.﹄Now the girl is only a miller's daughter, and
thinks she never can be Queen, so she makes the promise, and the Dwarf
spins the straw into gold. But she does become Queen, for the King marries
her because of the gold; and she forgets the Dwarf, and is very happy,
especially when her little baby comes. Directly it is born the Dwarf
appears also, and claims the child, because it was promised to him. The
Queen offers him anything he likes besides; but he will have that, and
that only. Then she cries and prays, and the Dwarf says that if she can
tell him his name she may keep the baby; and he feels quite safe in saying
this, because nobody knows his name, only himself. So the Queen calls him
by all kinds of strange names, but none of them is the right one. Then she
begs for three days to find out the name, and sends people everywhere to
see if they can hear it. But all of them come back, unable to find any
name that is likely, excepting one, who says, "I have not found a name,
but as I came to a high mountain near the edge of a forest, where the
foxes and the hares say 'good-night' to each other, I saw a little house,
and before the door a fire was burning, and round the fire a little man
was dancing on one leg, and singing:—
"To-day I stew, and then I'll bake,
To-morrow shall I the Queen's child take.
How glad I am that nobody knows
That my name is Rumpelstiltskin."
Then the Dwarf came again, and the Queen said to him, "Is your name Hans?"
"No," said the Dwarf, with an ugly leer, and he held out his hands for the
baby. "Is it Conrade?" asked the Queen. "No," cried the Dwarf,﹃give me
the child.﹄"Then," said the Queen, "is it Rumpelstiltskin?"﹃A witch has
told you that!﹄cried the Dwarf; and then he stamped his right foot so
hard upon the ground that it sank quite in, and he could not draw it out
again. Then he took hold of his left leg with both his hands and pulled so
hard that his right leg came off, and he hopped away howling, and nobody
ever saw him again.
The Giant in the story of St. Olaf, as we have seen, was a rather stupid
giant, and easily tricked; and indeed most of the giants seem to have been
dull people, from the great Greek Kyklops, Polyphemos the One-Eyed,
downwards to the ogres in Puss in Boots, and Jack and the Bean Stalk, and
the giants in Jack the Giant Killer. The old northern giants were no
wiser. There was one in the island of Rugen, a very mighty giant, named
Balderich. He wanted to go from his island, dry-footed, to the mainland.
So he got a great apron made, and filled it with earth, and set off to
make a causeway from Rugen to Pomerania. But there was a hole in the
apron, and the clay that fell out formed a chain of nine hills. The giant
stopped the hole and went on, but another hole tore in the apron, and
thirteen more hills fell out. Then he got to the sea-side, and poured the
rest of the load into the water; but it didn't quite reach the mainland,
which made giant Balderich so angry that he fell down and died; and so his
work has never been finished. But a giant maiden thought she would try to
make another causeway from the mainland to an island, so that she might
not wet her slippers in going over. So she filled her apron with sand, and
ran down to the sea-side. But a hole came in the apron, and the sand which
ran out formed a hill at Sagard. The giant maiden said,﹃Ah! now my mother
will scold me!﹄Then she stopped the hole with her hand and ran on again.
But the giant mother looked over the wood, and cried,﹃You nasty child!
what are you about? Come here, and you'll get a good whipping.﹄The
daughter in a fright let go her apron, and all the sand ran out, and made
the barren hills near Litzow, which the white and brown dwarfs took for
their dwelling-place.
There are many other stories of the same kind. One of them tells of a
Troll Giant who wanted to punish a farmer; so he filled one of his gloves
with sand, and poured it out over the farmer's house, which it quite
covered up; and with what was left in the fingers he made a row of little
sand hillocks to mark the spot.
The Giants had their day, and died out, and their places were taken by the
Dwarfs. Some of the most wonderful dwarf stories are those which are told
in the island of Rugen, in the Baltic Sea. These stories are of three
kinds of dwarfs: the White, and the Brown, and the Black, who live in the
sand-hills. The white dwarfs, in the spring and summer, dance and frolic
all their time in sunshine and starlight, and climb up into the flowers
and trees, and sit amongst the leaves and blossoms, and sometimes they
take the form of bright little birds, or white doves, or butterflies, and
are very kind to good people. In the winter, when the snow falls, they go
underground, and spend their time in making the most beautiful ornaments
of silver and gold. The brown dwarfs are stronger and rougher than the
white; they wear little brown coats and brown caps, and when they dance—which
they are fond of doing—they wear little glass shoes; and in dress
and appearance they are very handsome. Their disposition is good, with one
exception—that they carry off children into their underground
dwellings; and those who go there have to serve them for fifty years. They
can change themselves into any shape, and can go through key-holes, so
that they enter any house they please, and sometimes they bring gifts for
the children, like the good Santa Klaus in the German stories; but they
also play sad tricks, and frighten people with bad dreams. Like the white
dwarfs, the brown ones work in gold and silver, and the gifts they bring
are of their own workmanship. The black dwarfs are very bad people, and
are ugly in looks and malicious in temper; they never dance or sing, but
keep underground, or, when they come up, they sit in the elder-trees, and
screech horribly like owls, or mew like cats. They, too, are great
metal-workers, especially in steel; and in old days they used to make arms
and armour for the gods and heroes: shirts of mail as fine as cobwebs, yet
so strong that no sword could go through them; and swords that would bend
like rushes, and yet were as hard as diamonds, and would cut through any
helmet, however thick.
So long as they keep their caps on their heads the dwarfs are invisible;
but if any one can get possession of a dwarf's cap he can see them, and
becomes their master. This is the foundation of one of the best of the
dwarf stories—the story of John Dietrich, who went out to the
sandhills at Ramfin, in the isle of Rugen, on the eve of St. John, a very,
very long time ago, and managed to strike off the cap from the head of one
of the brown dwarfs, and went down with them into their underground
dwelling-place. This was quite a little town, where the rooms were
decorated with diamonds and rubies, and the dwarf people had gold and
silver and crystal table-services, and there were artificial birds that
flew about like real ones, and the most beautiful flowers and fruits; and
the dwarfs, who were thousands in number, had great feasts, where the
tables, ready spread, came up through the floor, and cleared themselves
away at the ringing of a bell, and left the rooms free for dancing to the
strains of the loveliest music. And in the city there were fields and
gardens, and lakes and rivers; and instead of the sun and the moon to give
light, there were large carbuncles and diamonds which supplied all that
was wanted. John Dietrich, who was very well treated, liked it very much,
all but one thing—which was that the servants who waited upon the
dwarfs were earth children, whom they had stolen and carried underground;
and amongst them was Elizabeth Krabbin, once a playmate of his own, and
who was a lovely girl, with clear blue eyes and ringlets of fair hair.
John Dietrich of course fell in love with Elizabeth, and determined to get
her out of the dwarf people's hands, and with her all the earth children
they held captive. And when he had been ten years underground, and he and
Elizabeth were grown up, he demanded leave to depart, and to take
Elizabeth. But the dwarfs, though they could not hinder him from going,
would not let her go, and no threats or entreaties could move them. Then
John Dietrich remembered that the little people cannot bear an evil smell;
and one day he happened to break a large stone, out of which jumped a
toad, which gave him power to do what he pleased with the dwarfs, for the
sight or smell of a toad causes them pain beyond all bearing. So he sent
for the chiefs of the dwarfs, and bade them let Elizabeth go. But they
refused; and then he went and fetched the toad. Then the story goes on in
this way:—
"He was hardly come within a hundred paces of them when they all fell to
the ground as if struck with a thunderbolt, and began to howl and whimper,
and to writhe as if suffering the most excruciating pain. The dwarfs
stretched out their hands, and cried, 'Have mercy, have mercy! we feel
that you have a toad, and there is no escape for us. Take the odious beast
away, and we will do all you require.' He let them kneel a few seconds
longer, and then took the toad away. They then stood up, and felt no more
pain. John let all depart but the six chief persons, to whom he said,
'This night, between twelve and one, Elizabeth and I will depart, Load for
me three waggons with gold, silver, and precious stones. I might, you
know, take all that is in the hill; but I will be merciful. Further, you
must put into two waggons all the furniture of my chamber (which was
covered with emeralds and other precious stones, and in the ceiling was a
diamond as big as a nine-pin bowl), and get ready for me the handsomest
travelling carriage that is in the hill, with six black horses. Moreover,
you must set at liberty all the servants who have been so long here that
on earth they would be twenty years old and upwards, and you must give
them as much silver and gold as will make them rich for life; and you must
make a law that no one shall be kept here longer than his twentieth year.'
﹃The six took the oath, and went away quite melancholy, and John buried
his toad deep in the ground. The little people laboured hard and prepared
everything, and at midnight John and Elizabeth, and their companions, and
all their treasures, were drawn up out of the hill. It was then one
o'clock, and it was midsummer—the very time that, twelve years
before, John had gone down into the hill. Music sounded around them, and
they saw the glass hill open, and the rays of the light of heaven shine on
them after so many years; and when they got out they saw the first streaks
of dawn already in the East. Crowds of the underground people were around
them, busied about the waggons. John bid them a last farewell, waved his
brown cap in the air, and then flung it among them. And at the same moment
he ceased to see them; he beheld nothing but a green hill, and the
well-known bushes and fields, and heard the church clock of Ramfin strike
two. When all was still, save a few larks, who were tuning their morning
song, they all fell upon their knees and worshipped God, resolving
henceforth to lead a pious and Christian life.﹄And then John married
Elizabeth, and was made a count, and built several churches, and presented
to them some of the precious cups and plates made by the underground
people, and kept his own and Elizabeth's glass shoes, in memory of what
had befallen them in their youth. "And they were all taken away," the
story says, "in the time of the great Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, when
the Russians came on the island, and the Cossacks plundered even the
churches, and took away everything."
Now there is much more to be told about the dwarfs, if only we had space—how
there were thousands of them in German lands, in the Saxon mines, and the
Black Forest, and the Harz mountains and in other places, and in
Switzerland, and indeed everywhere almost—how they gave gifts to
good men, and borrowed of them, and paid honestly; how they punished those
who injured them; how they moved about from country to country; how they
helped great kings and nobles, and showed themselves to wandering
travellers and to simple country folk. But all this must be left for you
to read for yourselves in Grimm's stories, and in the legends of northern
lands, and in many collections of ancient poems, and romances, and popular
tales. And in these, and in other books which deal with such subjects, you
will find out that all these dwellers in Wonderland, and the tales that
are told about them, and the stories of the gods and heroes, all come from
the one source of which we read something in the first chapter—the
tradition's of the ancient Aryan people, from whom all of us have sprung—and
how they all mean the same things; the conflict between light and
darkness, the succession of day and night, the changes of the seasons, the
blue and bright summer skies, the rain-clouds, the storm-winds, the
thunder and the lightning, and all the varied and infinite forms of Nature
in her moods of calm and storm, peace and tempest, brightness and gloom,
sweet and pleasant and hopeful life and stern and cold death, which causes
all brightness to fade and moulder away.
"Far from me is the hill of Ben Hederin;
Far from me is the Pass of Murmuring;"
and the common story says that the tune is still remembered and sung by
the people of that country. It is also told of a farmer, named Callum Mohr
MacIntosh, near Loch Traig, in Lochaber, that he had a fight with a Bocan,
and in the fight he lost a charmed handkerchief. When he went back to get
it again, he found the Bocan rubbing the handkerchief hard on a flat
stone, and the Bocan said,﹃It is well for you that you are back, for if I
had rubbed a hole in this you were a dead man.﹄This Bocan became very
friendly with MacIntosh, and used to bring him peats for fire in the deep
winter snows; and when MacIntosh moved to another farm, and left a
hogshead of hides behind him by accident, the Bocan carried it to his new
house next morning, over paths that only a goat could have crossed.
Another creature of the same kind is a mischievous spirit, a Goblin or
Brownie, who is called in the Manx language, the Glashan, and who appears
under various names in Highland stories: sometimes as a hairy man, and
sometimes as a water-horse turned into a man. He usually attacks lonely
women, who outwit him, and throw hot peats or scalding water at him, and
then he flies off howling. One feature is common to the stories about him.
He asks the woman what her name is, and she always replies "Myself." So
when the companions of the Glashan ask who burned or scalded him, he says
"Myself," and then they laugh at him. This answer marks the connection
between these tales and those of other countries. Polyphemos asks Odysseus
his name, and is told that it is Outis, or "Nobody." So when Odysseus
blinds Polyphemos, and the other Kyklopes ask the monster who did it, he
says, "Nobody did it." There is a Slavonian story, also, in which a
cunning smith puts out the eyes of the Devil, and says that his name is
Issi, "myself;" and when the tortured demon is asked who hurt him, he
says, "Issi did it;" and then his companions ridicule him.
Among other Highland fairy monsters are the water-horses (like the
Scandinavian and Teutonic Kelpies) and the water-bulls, which inhabit
lonely lochs. The water-bulls are described as being friendly to man; the
water-horses are dangerous—when men get upon their backs they are
carried off and drowned. Sometimes the water-horse takes the shape of a
man. Here is a story of this kind from the island of Islay: There was a
farmer who had a great many cattle. Once a strange-looking bull-calf was
born amongst them, and an old woman who saw it knew it for a water-bull,
and ordered it to be kept in a house by itself for seven years, and fed on
the milk of three cows. When the time was up, a servant-maid went to watch
the cattle graze on the side of a loch. In a little while a man came to
her and asked her to dress or comb his hair. So he laid his head upon her
knees, and she began to arrange his hair. Presently she got a great
fright, for amongst the hair she found a great quantity of water-weed; and
she knew that it was a transformed water-horse. Like a brave girl she did
not cry out, but went on dressing the man's hair until he fell asleep.
Then she slid her apron off her knees, and ran home as fast as she could,
and when she got nearly home, the creature was pursuing her in the shape
of a horse. Then the old woman cried out to them to open the door of the
wild bull's house, and out sprang the bull and rushed at the horse, and
they never stopped fighting until they drove each other out into the sea.
"Next day," says the story, "the body of the bull was found on the shore
all torn and spoilt, but the horse was never more seen at all."
Sometimes the water-spirit appears in the shape of a great bird, which the
West Highlanders called the Boobrie, who has a long neck, great webbed
feet with tremendous claws, a powerful bill hooked like an eagle's, and a
voice like the roar of an angry bull. The lochs, according to popular
fancy, are also inhabited by water-spirits. In Sutherlandshire this kind
of creature is called the Fuath; there are, Mr. Campbell says, males and
females; they have web-feet, yellow hair, green dresses, tails, manes, and
no noses; they marry human beings, are killed by light, are hurt by steel
weapons, and in crossing a stream they become restless. These spirits
resemble mermen and mermaids, and are also like the Kelpies, and they have
also been somehow confused with the kind of spirit known in Ireland as the
Banshee. Many stories are told of them. A shepherd found one, an old woman
seemingly crippled, at the edge of a bog. He offered to carry her over on
his back. In going over, he saw that she was webfooted; so he threw her
down, and ran for his life. By the side of Loch Middle a woman saw one—"about
three years ago," she told the narrator—she sat on a stone, quiet,
and dressed in green silk, the sleeves of the dress curiously puffed from
the wrists to the shoulder; her hair was yellow, like ripe corn; but on a
nearer view, she had no nose. A man at Tubernan made a bet that he would
seize the Fuath or Kelpie who haunted the loch at Moulin na Fouah. So he
took a brown right-sided maned horse, and a brown black-muzzled dog, and
with the help of the dog he captured the Fuath, and tied her on the horse
behind him. She was very fierce, but he pinned her down with an awl and a
needle. Crossing the burn or brook near Loch Migdal she grew very
restless, and the man stuck the awl and the needle into her with great
force. Then she cried,﹃Pierce me with the awl, but keep that slender
hair-like slave (the needle) out of me.﹄When the man reached an inn at
Inveran, he called his friends to come out and look at the Fuath. They
came out with lights, and when the light fell upon her she dropped off the
horse, and fell to the earth like a small lump of jelly.
The Fairies of the West Highlands in some degree resembled the
Scandinavian Dwarfs. They milked the deer; they lived underground, and
worked at trades, especially metal-working and weaving. They had hammers
and anvils, but had to steal wool and to borrow looms; and they had great
hoards of treasure hidden in their dwelling places. Sometimes they helped
the people whom they liked, but at other times they were spiteful and evil
minded; and according to tradition all over the Highlands, they enticed
men and women into their dwellings in the hills, and kept them there
sometimes for years, always dancing without stopping. There are many
stories of this kind; and there are also many about the fondness of the
Fairies for carrying off human children, and leaving Imps of their own in
their places—these Imps being generally old men disguised as
children. Some of these tales are very curious, and are like others that
are found amongst the folk-lore of Celtic peoples elsewhere. Here is the
substance of one told in Islay:—
Years ago there lived in Crossbrig a smith named MacEachern, who had an
only son, about fourteen; a strong, healthy, cheerful boy. All of a sudden
he fell ill, took to his bed, and moped for days, getting thin, and
odd-looking, and yellow, and wasting away fast, so that they thought he
must die. Now a "wise" old man, who knew about Fairies, came to see the
smith at work, and the poor man told him all about his trouble. The old
man said,﹃It is not your son you have got; the boy has been carried off
by the Dacorie Sith (the Fairies), and they have left a sibhreach
(changeling) in his place.﹄Then the old man told him what to do.﹃Take as
many egg-shells as you can get, go with them into the room, spread them
out before him, then draw water with them, carrying them two and two in
your hands as if they were a great weight, and when they are full, range
them round the fire.﹄The smith did as he was told; and he had not been
long at work before there came from the bed a great shout of laughter, and
the supposed boy cried out,﹃I am eight hundred years old, and I never saw
the like of that before.﹄Then the smith knew that it was not his
own son. The wise man advised him again. "Your son," he said,﹃is in a
green round hill where the Fairies live; get rid of this creature, and
then go and look for him.﹄So the smith lit a fire in front of the bed.
"What is that for?" asked the supposed boy. "You will see presently," said
the smith; and then he took him and threw him into the middle of it; and
the sibhreach gave an awful yell, and flew up through the roof, where a
hole was left to let the smoke out. Now the old man said that on a certain
night the green round hill, where the Fairies kept the smith's boy, would
be open. The father was to take a Bible, a dirk, and a crowing cock, and
go there. He would hear singing, and dancing, and much merriment, but he
was to go boldly in. The Bible would protect him against the Fairies, and
he was to stick the dirk into the threshold, to prevent the hill closing
upon him. Then he would see a grand room, and there, working at a forge,
he would find his own son; and when the Fairies questioned him he was to
say that he had come for his boy, and would not go away without him. So
the smith went, and did what the old man told him. He heard the music,
found the hill open, went in, stuck the dirk in the threshold, carried the
Bible on his breast, and took the cock in his hand. Then the Fairies
angrily asked what he wanted, and he said,﹃I want my son whom I see down
there, and I will not go without him.﹄Upon this the whole company of the
Fairies gave a loud laugh, which woke up the cock, and he leaped on the
smith's shoulders, clapped his wings, and crowed lustily. Then the Fairies
took the smith and his son, put them out of the hill, flung the dirk after
them, and the hill-side closed up again. For a year and a day after he got
home the boy never did any work, and scarcely spoke a word; but at last
one day sitting by his father, and seeing him finish a sword for the
chieftain, he suddenly said, "That's not the way to do it," and he took
the tools, and fashioned a sword the like of which was never seen in that
country before; and from that day he worked and lived as usual.
Here is another story. A woman was going through a wild glen in Strath
Carron, in Sutherland—the Glen Garaig—carrying her infant
child wrapped in her plaid. Below the path, overhung with trees, ran a
very deep ravine, called Glen Odhar, or the dun glen. The child, not a
year old, suddenly spoke, and said:—
"Many a dun hummel cow,
With a calf below her,
Have I seen milking
In that dun glen yonder,
Without dog, without man,
Without woman, without gillie,
But one man; and he hoary."
Then the woman knew that it was a fairy changeling she was carrying, and
she flung down the child and the plaid, and ran home, where her own baby
lay smiling in the cradle.
A tailor went to a farm-house to work, and just as he was going in,
somebody put into his hands a child of a month old, which a little lady
dressed in green seemed to be waiting to receive. The tailor ran home and
gave the child to his wife. When he got back to the farm-house he found
the farmer's child crying and yelping, and disturbing everybody. It was a
fairy changeling which the nurse had taken in, meaning to give the
farmer's own child to the fairy in exchange; but nobody knew this but the
tailor. When they were all gone out he began to talk to the child.﹃Hae ye
your pipes?﹄said the Tailor. "They're below my head," said the
Changeling. "Play me a spring," said the Tailor. Out sprang the little man
and played the bagpipes round the room. Then there was a noise outside,
and the Elf said, "Its my folk wanting me," and away he went up the
chimney; and then they fetched back the farmer's child from the tailor's
house.
One more story: it is told by the Sutherland-shire folk. A small farmer
had a boy who was so cross that nothing could be done with him. One day
the farmer and his wife went out, and put the child to bed in the kitchen;
and they bid the farm lad to go and look at it now and then, and to thrash
out the straw in the barn. The lad went to look at the child, and the
Child said to him in a sharp voice, "What are you going to do?"﹃Thrash
out a pickle of straw,﹄said the Lad,﹃lie still and don't grin, like a
good bairn.﹄But the little Imp of out of bed, and said,﹃Go east, Donald,
and when ye come to the big brae (or brow of the hill), rap three times,
and when they come, say ye are seeking Johnnie's flail.﹄Donald did
so, and out came a little fairy man, and gave him a flail. Then Johnnie
took the flail, thrashed away at the straw, finished it, sent the flail
back, and went to bed again. When the parents came back, Donald told them
all about it; and so they took the Imp out of the cradle, put it in a
basket, and set the basket on the fire. No sooner did the creature feel
the fire than he vanished up the chimney. Then there was a low crying
noise at the door, and when they opened it, a pretty little lad, whom the
mother knew to be her own, stood shivering outside.
A few notes about West Highland giants must end this account of wonder
creatures in this region. There was a giant in Glen Eiti, a terrible
being, who comes into a wild strange story, too long to be told here. He
is described as having one hand only, coming out of the middle of his
chest, one leg coming out of his haunch, and one eye in the middle of his
face. And in the same story there is another giant called the Fachan, and
the story says, "Ugly was the make of the Fachan; there was one hand out
of the ridge of his chest, and one tuft out of the top of his head; it
were easier to take a mountain from the root than to bend that tuft."
Usually, the Highland giants were not such dreadful creatures as this.
Like giants in all stories, they were very stupid, and were easily
outwitted by cunning men. "The Gaelic giants (Mr. Campbell says)[9] are
very like those of Norse and German tales, but they are much nearer to
real men than the giants of Germany and Scandinavia and Greece and Rome,
who are almost, if not quite, equal to the gods. Their world is generally,
though not always, underground; it has castles, and parks, and pasture,
and all that is found above on the earth. Gold, and silver, and copper
abound in the giants' land, jewels are seldom mentioned, but cattle, and
horses, and spoil of dresses, and arms, and armour, combs, and basins,
apples, shields, bows, spears, and horses are all to be gained by a fight
with the giants. Still, now and then a giant does some feat quite beyond
the power of man, such as a giant in Barra, who fished up a hero, boat and
all, with his fishing-rod, from a rock and threw him over his head, as
little boys do 'cuddies' from the pier end. So the giants may be degraded
gods, after all." In the story of Connal, told by Kenneth MacLennan of
Pool Ewe, there is a giant who was beaten by the hero of the tale. Connal
was the son of King Cruachan, of Eirinn, and he set out on his adventures.
He met a giant who had a great treasure of silver and gold, in a cave at
the bottom of a rock, and the giant used to promise a bag of gold to
anybody who would allow himself to be let down in a creel or basket, and
send some of it up. Many people were lost in trying it, for when the giant
had let them down, and they had filled the creel, the giant used to draw
up the creel of gold, and then he would not let it down again, and so
those who had gone down for it were left to perish in the deep cavern. Now
Connal agreed to go down, and the giant served him in the same way that he
had done the rest, and Connal was left in the cave among the dead men and
the gold. Now the giant could not get anybody else to go down, and as he
wanted more gold, he let his own son down in the creel, and gave him the
sword of light, so that he might see his way before him. When the young
giant got into the cave, Connal took the sword of light very quickly, and
cut off the young giant's head, Then Connal put gold into the bottom of
the creel, and got in himself, and covered himself over with gold, and
gave a pull at the rope, and the giant drew up the creel, and when he did
not see his son, he threw the creel over the back of his head; and Connal
took the sword of light, and cut off the giant's head, and went away home
with the sword and the gold.
There was a King of Lochlin, who had three daughters, and three giants
stole them, and carried them down under the earth; and a wise man told the
King that the only way to get them back was to make a ship that would sail
over land or sea. So the King said that anybody who would make such a ship
should marry his eldest daughter. There was a widow who had three sons,
and the eldest of them said he would go into the forest and cut wood, and
make the ship; and his mother gave him a large bannock (oat cake), and
away he went. Then a Fairy came out of the river, and asked for a bit of
the bannock, but he would not give her a morsel; so he began cutting the
wood, but as fast as he cut them down, the trees grew up again, and he
went home sorrowful. Then the next brother did the same, and he failed
also. Then the youngest brother went, and he took a little bannock,
instead of a big one, and the Fairy came again, and he gave her a share of
the bannock; and she told him to meet her there in a year and a day, and
the ship should be ready. And it was ready, and the youngest son sailed
away in it. Then he came to a man who was drinking up a river; and the
youngest son hired him for a servant. After a time, he found a man who was
eating a whole ox, and he hired him too. Then he saw another man, with his
ear to the earth, and he said he was hearing the grass grow; so he hired
him also. Then they got to a great cave, and the last man listened, and
said it was where the three giants kept the King's three daughters, and
they went down into the cave, and up to the house of the biggest giant.
"Ha! ha!" said the Giant,﹃you are seeking the King's daughter, but thou
wilt not have her, unless thou hast a man who will drink as much water as
I.﹄Then the river-drinker set to work, and so did the giant, and before
the man was half satisfied, the giant burst. Then they went to where the
second giant was. "Ho! ho!" said the Giant,﹃thou art seeking the King's
daughter, but thou wilt not get her, if thou hast not a man who will eat
as much flesh as I.﹄Then the ox-eater began, and so did the giant; but
before the man was half satisfied, the giant burst. Then they went on to
the third Giant; and the Giant said to the youngest son that he should
have the King's daughter if he would stay with him for a year and a day as
a slave. Then they sent up the King's three daughters, and the three men
out of the cave; and the youngest son stayed with the giant for a year and
a day. When the time was up the youngest son said, "Now I am going." Then
the Giant said, "I have an eagle that will take thee up;" and he put him
on the eagle's back, and fifteen oxen for the eagle to eat on her way up;
but before the eagle had got half way up she had eaten all the oxen, and
came back again. So the youngest son had to stay with the giant for
another year and a day. When the time was up, the Giant put him on the
eagle again, and thirty oxen to last her for food; but before she got to
the top she ate them all, and so went back again; and the young man had to
stay another year and a day with the giant. At the end of the third year
and a day, the Giant put him on the eagle's back a third time, and gave
her three score of oxen to eat; and just when they got to the mouth of the
cave, where the earth began, all the oxen were eaten, and the eagle was
going back again. But the young man cut a piece out of his own thigh, and
gave it to the eagle, and with one spring she was on the surface of the
earth. Then the Eagle said to him,﹃Any hard lot that comes to thee,
whistle, and I will be at thy side.﹄Now the youngest son went to the town
where the King of Lochlin lived with the daughters he had got back from
the giants; and he hired himself to work at blowing the bellows for a
smith. And the King's oldest daughter ordered the smith to make her a
golden crown like that she had when she was with the giant, or she would
cut off his head. The bellows-blower said he would do it. So the smith
gave him the gold, and he shut himself up, and broke the gold into
splinters, and threw it out of the window, and people picked it up. Then
he whistled for the Eagle, and she came, and he ordered her to fetch the
gold crown that belonged to the biggest giant; and the Eagle fetched it,
and the smith took it to the King's daughter, who was quite satisfied.
Then the King's second daughter wanted a silver crown like that she had
when she was with the second giant; and the King's youngest daughter
wanted a copper crown, like that she had when she was with the third
Giant; and the Eagle fetched them both for the young man, and the smith
took them to the King's daughters. Then the King asked the smith how he
did all this; and the smith said it was his bellows-blower who did it. So
the King sent a coach and four horses for the bellows-blower, and the
servants took him, all dirty as he was, and threw him into the coach like
a dog. But on the way he called the eagle, who took him out of the coach,
and filled it with stones, and when the King opened the door, the stones
fell out upon him, and nearly killed him; and then, the story says,﹃There
was catching of the horse gillies, and hanging them for giving such an
affront to the King.﹄Then the King sent a second time, and these
messengers also were very rude to the bellows-blower, so he made the eagle
fill the coach with dirt, which fell about the King's ears, and the second
set of servants were punished. The third time the King sent his trusty
servant, who was very civil, and asked the bellows-blower to wash himself,
and he did so, and the eagle brought a gold and silver dress that had
belonged to the biggest giant, and when the King opened the coach door
there was sitting inside the very finest man he ever saw. And the young
man told the King all that had happened, and they gave him the King's
eldest daughter for his wife, and the wedding lasted twenty days and
twenty nights.
One story more, of how a Giant was outwitted by a maiden. It is told in
the island of Islay. There was a widow, who had three daughters, who went
out to seek their fortunes. The two elder ones did not want the youngest,
and they tied her in turns to a rock, a peat-stack, and a tree, but she
got loose and came after them. They got to the house of a Giant, and had
leave to stop for the night, and were put to bed with the Giant's
daughters. The Giant came home and said,﹃The smell of strange girls is
here,﹄and he ordered his gillie to kill them; and the gillie was to know
them from the Giant's daughters by these having twists of amber beads
round their necks, and the others having twists of horse-hair. Now Maol o
Chliobain, the youngest of the widow's daughters, heard this, and she
changed the necklaces, and so the gillie came and killed the Giant's
daughters, and Maol o Chliobain took the golden cloth that was on the bed,
and ran away with her sisters. But the cloth was an enchanted cloth, and
it cried out to the Giant, who pursued them till they came to a river, and
then Maol plucked out a hair of her head, and made a bridge of it; but the
Giant could not get over; so he called out to Maol,﹃And when wilt thou
come again?﹄"I will come when my business brings me," she said; and then
he went home again. They got to a farmer's house, and told him their
history. Said the Farmer, who had three sons,﹃I will give my eldest son
to thy eldest sister; get for me the fine comb of gold and the coarse comb
of silver that the Giant has.﹄So she went and fetched the combs, and the
Giant followed her till they came to the river, which the Giant could not
get over; so he went back again. Then the farmer said he would marry his
second son to the second sister, if Maol would get him the sword of light
that the Giant had. So she went to the Giant's house, and got up into a
tree that was over the well; and when the Giant's gillie came to draw
water, she came down and pushed him into the well, and carried away the
sword of light that he had with him. Then the Giant followed her again,
and again the river stopped him; and he went back. Now the farmer said he
would give his youngest son to Maol o Chliobain herself, if she would
bring him the buck the Giant had. So she went, but when she had caught the
buck, the Giant caught her. And he said,﹃Thou least killed my three
daughters, and stolen my combs of gold and silver; what wouldst thou do to
me if I had done as much harm to thee as thou to me?﹄She said,﹃I would
make thee burst thyself with milk porridge, I would then put thee in a
sack, I would hang thee to the roof-tree, I would set fire under thee, and
I would lay on thee with clubs till thou shouldst fall as a faggot of
withered sticks on the floor.﹄So the Giant made milk porridge and forced
her to drink it, and she lay down as if she were dead. Then the Giant put
her in a sack, and hung her to the roof tree, and he went away to the
forest to get wood to burn her, and he left his old mother to watch till
he came back. When the Giant was gone Maol o Chliobain began to cry out,
"I am in the light; I am in the city of gold." "Wilt thou let me in?" said
the Giant's mother. "I will not let thee in," said Maol o Chliobain. Then
the Giant's mother let the sack down, and Maol o Chliobain got out, and
she put into the sack the Giant's mother, and the cat, and the calf, and
the cream-dish; and then she took the buck and went away. When the Giant
came back he began beating the sack with clubs, and his Mother cried out,
"Tis I myself that am in it." "I know that thyself is in it," said the
Giant, and he laid on all the harder. Then the sack fell down like a
bundle of withered sticks, and the Giant found that he had killed his
mother. So he knew that Maol o Chliobain had played him a trick, and he
went after her, and got up to her just as she leaped over the river.﹃Thou
art over there, Maol o Chliobain﹄said the Giant. "I am over," she said.
"Thou killedst my three bald brown daughters?"﹃I killed them, though it
is hard for thee.﹄"Thou stolest my golden comb, and my silver comb?"﹃I
stole them.﹄"Thou killedst my bald rough-skinned gillie?" "I killed him."
"Thou stolest my glaive (sword) of light?" "I stole it."﹃Thou killedst my
mother?﹄"I killed her, though it is hard for thee."﹃Thou stolest my
buck?﹄"I stole it." "When wilt thou come again?"﹃I will come when my
business brings me.﹄"If thou wert over here, and I yonder," said the
Giant, "what wouldst thou do to follow me?" "I would kneel down," she
said, "and I would drink till I should dry the river." Then the poor
foolish Giant knelt down, and he drank till he burst; and then Maol o
Chliobain went off with the buck and married the youngest son of the
farmer.
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