Basque Legends; With an Essay on the Basque Language
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Title: Basque Legends; With an Essay on the Basque Language
Author: Wentworth Webster
Contributor: Julien Vinson
Release date: January 9, 2011 [eBook #34902]
Most recently updated: December 15, 2022
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BASQUE LEGENDS; WITH AN ESSAY ON THE BASQUE LANGUAGE ***
Second Edition.
BASQUE LEGENDS:
Collected, Chiefly in the Labourd,
By
Rev. WENTWORTH WEBSTER, M.A., Oxon.
With an Essay
On
The Basque Language,
By
M. Julien Vinson,
Of the Revue de Linguistique, Paris.
Together with
Appendix: Basque Poetry.
London:
Griffith and Farran,
Successors to Newbery and Harris,
Corner of St. Paul's Churchyard;
And
Walbrook & Co., 52, Fleet Street, E. C.
1879.
All Rights Reserved.
Printed by
W. O. Walbrook,
at the
Fleet Street Printing Works,
52, Fleet Street, London.
To
M. Antoine D'Abbadie,
of Abbadia,
Member of the Institute of France,
this
Translation of Legends,
originally told in the language of his ancestors,
in grateful acknowledgment
of
kindly courtesy and of ever-ready assistance,
is
dedicated
by his obliged and obedient servant,
Wentworth Webster.
CONTENTS.
Page
Introduction vii
I.--Legends of the Tartaro 1
The Tartaro 4
M. d'Abbadie's Version 4
Variations of above 5
Errua, the Madman 6
Variations of above 10
The Three Brothers, the Cruel Master, and the Tartaro 11
The Tartaro and Petit Perroquet 16
II.--The Heren-Suge.--The Seven-Headed Serpent 20
The Grateful Tartaro and the Heren-Suge 22
Variation of above 32
The Seven-Headed Serpent 33
The Serpent in the Wood 38
III.--Animal Tales 42
Acheria, the Fox 43
The Ass and the Wolf 45
IV.--Basa-Jaun, Basa-Andre, and Lamiñak 47
Basa-Jauna 49
The Servant at the Fairy's 53
The Fairy in the House 55
The Pretty but Idle Girl 56
The Devil's Age 58
The Fairy-Queen Godmother 59
V.--Witchcraft and Sorcery 64
The Witches at the Sabbat 66
The Witches and the Idiots 67
The Witch and the New-Born Infant 69
The Changeling 73
VI.--Contes des Fées 76
(A) Tales like the Keltic 77
Malbrouk 77
The Fisherman and his Sons 87
Tabakiera, the Snuff-Box 94
Mahistruba, the Master Mariner 100
Dragon 106
Ezkabi-Fidel 111
Variation of above 120
The Lady-Pigeon and her Comb 120
Suggested Explanation of above 130
Laur-Cantons 132
The Young School-Boy 136
The Son who Heard Voices 137
The Mother and her Idiot Son; or, the Clever Thief 140
Juan Dekos, the Blockhead (Tontua) 146
Variation of the above--Juan de Kalais 151
The Duped Priest 154
(B) Contes des Fées, derived directly from the
French 158
Ass'-Skin 158
Variations of above 165
The Step-Mother and Step-Daughter 166
Beauty and the Beast 167
Variation of above 172
The Cobbler and his Three Daughters (Blue-Beard) 173
Variations of above 175
The Singing Tree, the Bird which tells the Truth,
and the Water which makes Young 176
Variation of above 181
The White Blackbird 182
The Sister and her Seven Brothers 187
Variations, etc. 191
List of Publication of Foreign Legends in France 192
VII.--Religious Tales 194
Fourteen 195
Variation of above--Jesus Christ and the Old Soldier 199
The Poor Soldier and the Rich Man 200
The Widow and her Son 202
The Story of the Hair-Cloth Shirt (La Cilice) 206
The Saintly Orphan Girl 209
The Slandered and Despised Girl 211
An Essay on the Basque Language 219
Appendix--Basque Poetry 235
INTRODUCTION.
The study of the recent science of Comparative Mythology is one of the
most popular and attractive of minor scientific pursuits. It deals
with a subject-matter which has interested most of us at one period
of our lives, and turns the delight of our childhood into a charm and
recreation for maturer age. Nor is it without more useful lessons. In
it we see more clearly than perhaps elsewhere the reciprocal influence,
which none can wholly escape, of words and language upon thought, and
again of thought and fancy upon words and language; how mere words and
syllables may modify both conception and belief; how the metaphor,
which at first presented an object more clearly and vividly to the
mind than any more direct form of speech could do, soon confuses
and at last wholly distorts the original idea, and buries its
meaning under a new and foreign superstructure. We may mark here,
too, by numerous examples, how slowly the human mind rises to the
conception of any abstract truth, and how continually it falls back
upon the concrete fact which it is compelled to picture to itself in
order to state in words the simplest mental abstraction. The phrase,
"The dawn flies before the sun," passing into the myth of Daphne and
Apollo, is a lesson in psychology no less than in philology and in
comparative mythology.
Now, both the interest and the value of these studies are enhanced in
proportion as they become complete. Our conclusions approach nearer
to certainty, and will gradually pass from theory to demonstration,
as we find the same legends and modes of thought and expression on
natural phenomena constantly reappearing among the most distant and
the most isolated peoples, in languages which in their complex forms
tell of the infancy of human speech, and also in those whose worn-down
frame speaks of the world's old age.
Of the peoples now settled in Western Europe, the Basques are those
which are the most separate from other populations; distinct in
language, they represent, in a more or less mixed state, some older
stratum of European ethnology. Their language, too, as regards the
mass of the people, is still practically unwritten. [1] Here there is
a chance of finding legends in a purer and older form than among any
other European people; and in what they have borrowed from others, we
may have an almost unique crucial test of the time which it takes for
such traditions to pass orally from people of one language to another
and totally different one. None of these legends have been published
or even noticed till within the last two years, when M. d'Abbadie
read the legend of the Tartaro before the Société des Sciences et des
Arts de Bayonne, and M. Cerquand his "Légendes et Récits Populaires
du Pays Basque," before the sister society at Pau. [2]
Of course we must expect to find such legends very much altered,
and in a state of almost inextricable confusion, and this not only
through forgetfulness, and through the lapse of time since their
origin, not only by the influence of a total change of religion, but
they are also mingled and inter-penetrated with totally new ideas; the
old and the new will be found side by side in striking and sometimes
grotesque contrast. As in Campbell's "Tales of the West Highlands,"
personages of mythical antiquity go to kirk, and indulge in other
decidedly post-Reformation practices, so in these Basque tales the
reader must not be startled by the introduction of maize and tobacco,
of cannon and gunpowder, of dances at the mairie, and the use of
the guillotine, in stories which, perhaps, originally told of the
movements of the stars, of the wars of the forces of the atmosphere,
of the bright beauty of the rising, or of the glowing glory of the
setting sun. [3] The body is the same in all ages, but the dress varies
with the changing fashions. To borrow an illustration from a slightly
older science, this is not a simple case of contorted and overlying
strata to be restored to their original order, but rather of strata
worn down, reconstructed, and deposited anew, and even modified in
their latest stage by the interference of human action. And thus our
problem becomes an exceedingly complex and difficult one, and our
readers must not be disappointed if our conclusions are not so clear
and positive as might be wished. The present is merely a tentative,
and not, in any sense, a final essay towards its solution.
How are these legends told now, and how have they been preserved? They
are told by the Basque peasants, either when neighbours meet--after
the fashion made familiar to us by American novelists in the "Husking
Bee"--for the purpose of stripping the husks from the ears of maize,
an operation generally performed in one or two long sessions; or at the
prolonged wedding and other feasts, of which we have evidence in the
tales themselves, or else in the long nights round the wintry hearth
of their lonely dwellings. For it is one of the charms of the Basque
land that the houses are scattered all over the face of the country,
instead of being collected into crowded villages; and it is, perhaps,
to this fact chiefly that we owe the preservation of so much old-world
lore, and of primitive ideas, among this people. The reader must not
be surprised at the length of some of our specimens. The details of
the incidents of the longest are religiously preserved and, as told
at home, they are probably more lengthy (as anyone will understand
who has ever taken anything down from recitation) than as here
given. Many an unlettered Basque peasant could serve an irritable
stranger as Glendower did Hotspur, when he kept him "at least nine
hours in reckoning up the several devils' names that were his lackeys."
In La Soule the "Pastorales," or Basque dramas, which last from six
to eight hours of uninterrupted action, are learnt in the same way
by word of mouth during the long evenings of winter.
These legends are still most thoroughly believed in. They still
form part of the faith of these simple people--not at all, we need
hardly say, in the use of mythological or atmospheric allegory,
but as narratives of veritable fact. They believe them as they do
the histories of the Bible or the "Lives of the Saints." In fact,
the problem of reconciling religion and science presents itself to
their minds in this strange guise--how to reconcile these narratives
with those of the Bible and of the Church. The general solution is
that they happened before the time of which the Bible speaks, or
before Adam fell. They are "Lege zaharreko istorriguak"--"histories
of the ancient law"--by which is apparently meant the time before
Christianity. "This happened, sir, in the time when all animals and
all things could speak," was said again and again by our narrators at
the commencement of their story; not one doubted the literal truth of
what they told. Their naïve good faith occasionally severely tested
our own gravity. Appeal was often made to our supposed superior
knowledge to confirm the facts. The varying tone of the voice told
how truly the speakers sympathised with what they uttered. At times
sobs almost interrupted utterance, when the frequent apostrophe
came: "Think how this poor so-and-so must have suffered!" More often
bursts of laughter at traditional jokes, too poor to raise a smile on
less unsophisticated lips, broke the recital. Very determined, too,
is their adherence to what they believe to be the genuine text of
these old tales. "I don't understand it, but the history says so;"
"It is so;" "The story says so," was positively affirmed again and
again--e.g., in one of the Peau d'Ane or Cinderella stories, when the
lady has dazzled her admirer by her dress of silver (moonlight?),
then of gold (sunlight?), then of diamonds (dew-drops?), at last,
on the wedding-day, the bride and bridegroom dress each other. "I
don't know why," interrupted the story-teller, "but the story says
so." Could anything tell more quaintly of the marriage of the sun and
dawn? The sun decking the morning clouds with his light and beauty,
and they again robing him in their soft and tender colouring.
But we must pass on to the tales themselves. None of these, we think,
will be found to be genuinely or exclusively Basque; the oldest we take
to be those most widely known, and which are most distorted. The heads
under which we have arranged them are: (1) Legends of the Tartaro,
or Cyclops; (2) of the Heren-Suge, the Seven-Headed Serpent; (3)
of purely Animal Tales, which are neither fables nor allegories;
(4) of Basa-Jauna, Basa-Andre, and of the Lamiñak, or Fairies; (5)
Tales of Witchcraft; (6) those which, for want of a better name,
we have entitled Contes des Fées, in which the fairy is an Eastern
magician--these we have divided into sections, (a) those which
resemble the Keltic and other tales, and (b) those which are probably
borrowed directly from the French; our last division (7), Religious
Tales and Legends, are probably from mediæval sources common to Latin
Christianity, but they are interesting as specimens of the tales which
probably delighted the highest born of our own ancestors in the middle
ages, and now linger only among the peasantry in out-of-the-way corners
of Europe. Some of these tales seem to us to be more gracefully told,
and have more of human interest in them, than any of the others.
We fear scientific men will be disappointed in this
collection. Notwithstanding that we have been careful to collect from
those who know the Basque only, or who certainly knew only Basque
when they first learnt these tales, yet they are evidently much mixed
with French and Spanish. Our translations are literal to baldness;
the only liberty we have taken is in softening down the exceeding
directness and grossness of some portions. Not one tale is in the
least licentious--but the Basque language calls a spade a spade,
and not an implement of husbandry. [4] The Carlist war of the last
four years has prevented our getting any legends from the Spanish
Basque provinces, and has even to some extent hindered our work in
the French Pays Basque, by providing an almost exclusive object of
interest. In the more remote districts of the Pays Basque itself,
which we have not been able to revisit since we commenced this
collection, purer forms of some of these legends may be found, and
others of which we have no example; [5] but these which we give are
really representative. Though collected mainly in the neighbourhood
of St. Jean de Luz, we have tested them by enquiry of natives of all
the provinces, and find that they are equally well known in La Soule
and in Basse Navarre as in the Labourd. We never met with a Basque
peasant who could not tell us what are the Tartaro, the Heren-Suge,
Basa-Jaun, and the Lamiñak.
As a curious coincidence, we may notice how closely some of the Basque
names of the stars parallel those given in Miss Frere's delightful
"Old Deccan Days." In the narrator's narrative, pp. 27, 28, we read,
"She (the grandmother) would show us the hen and chickens" (the
Pleiades)--the same in Basque, "Oiloa chituekin;" "The three thieves
climbing up to rob the Ranee's silver bedstead"--the three stars in
Orion's belt, in Basque, the three kings, or brothers, or robbers; the
milky way, "the great pathway of light on which He went up to heaven,"
has also obtained in Basque a Christianized name--"Erromako zubia,
or Bidea," "the bridge or road to Rome." Again, "All the cobras in
my grandmother's stories were seven-headed," so the Heren-Suge in
the Basque country is always seven-headed. Little or nothing can be
gathered from the names of the actors, the heroes or heroines of
these tales. They are mostly anonymous, but the name, when given,
is almost always borrowed from the French. This is disappointing,
and much increases the difficulty of tracing the origin; but it is
analogous to the fact that scarcely a single purely Basque name is
to be found among the so-called kings and chieftains of the Basques
during the early middle ages. [6] Among the classic writers, too,
and among the soldiers and followers of our Anglo-Gascon princes,
hardly a name indubitably Basque is to be found.
For all more special details and discussions we refer to the
Introductions to the separate sections. The few references given to
the parallel legends of other countries are not intended to be at
all complete, much less exhaustive. The Pays Basque is not a land of
libraries, and it is not easy to collect these legends on the spot, and
at the same time to get together the books necessary for a comparison
of them with those of other countries. The few we offer are only those
which have fallen in our way, and though worthless to the specialist,
may be of some little aid as suggestions to the ordinary reader. [7]
For the same purpose we annex a list of the first publication of the
chief collections of foreign legends in France. [8] It is curious to
remark that, while the masterpieces of French literature seem never
to have penetrated beyond the surface of society, these legends have
pierced to the very bottom of the social mass, and have become real
living household words, even to those many millions of Frenchmen who
do not understand one word of French.
There remains the pleasant task of thanking some of the many friends
who have assisted us in this collection. I had hoped to have joined the
name of M. J. Vinson, the well-known Basque and Dravidian scholar,
to my own as joint-author of this simple work. I should hardly
have had the courage to have undertaken it had I not been assured
of his invaluable assistance in difficulties about the language of
the originals. Unavoidable circumstances have, however, prevented his
seeing the Basque of many of the later tales, and he therefore prefers
that the "Essay on the Basque Language" should alone bear his name. I
cannot but accede to his wishes; but, at the same time, I offer him
my most grateful thanks for the unfailing and unwearied help which he
so kindly afforded me for many months. The legends contributed by him
are noticed in their proper place. Our first acknowledgments are due
to M. d'Abbadie, of Abbadia, the well-known "Membre de l'Institut,"
for his kind assistance and ready communication of the legends in
his possession, and which were the starting point of our work. Next,
and even more, to Madame M. Bellevue, of Dajieu-baita, through whose
kind intervention the majority of these tales were collected, and who
assisted in the translation of almost all. And then to the sisters
Estefanella and Gagna-haurra Hirigaray, who contributed more than
twenty tales; to Dr. Guilbeau and other friends at St. Jean de Luz
who have taken a friendly interest in our work, and to all those
whose names are appended to the tales they furnished. It would be
presumptuous to hope that our readers will find as much pleasure in
perusing these tales as we have had in collecting them.
I.--LEGENDS OF THE TARTARO.
Who, or what is the Tartaro? "Oh! you mean the man with one eye in
the middle of his forehead," is the prompt and universal answer. The
Tartaro is the Cyclops, the sun's round eye, k'uklwy. But the word
Tartaro has apparently nothing to do with this. M. Cerquand, in his
"Legendes et Récits Populaires du Pays Basque," derives the word from
Tartare, Tartar, in the same way as the French word Ogre is said to
be derived from Hongrois, Ugri. The only objection to this highly
probable derivation (made still more probable by a Souletin variation,
Moiriak) is the comparatively late date (the 13th century) of the
first appearance of the Tartars in Europe. [9] It is besides perfectly
true that in many tales the Tartaro replaces, and is identical with
the giant or ogre; but this does not appear to us to be the original
conception of this mythological monster, nor have we ever heard from
an unlettered Basque such a description of him. To them he is simply
a Cyclops--a huge man, with an eye in the centre of his forehead.
It is an interesting question--Is there any connection between
the Basque Tartaro and the Cyclops of the Odyssey and of the
classics? First, we must remark that the Cyclops legend is not peculiar
either to the Greek and Latin writers, or even to the Aryan nations;
e.g., in his communication of the Tartaro legends to the Société des
Sciences de Bayonne, M. d'Abaddie relates how he heard the tale told
in June, 1843, in Eastern Africa, in Lat. N. 9.2, E. Lon. 34.48, by
a man who had never before quitted the country. It is then only the
special form of the legend, and not the primary idea, that the Greeks
may have borrowed from the Basques. But there is this to observe--that,
with both Greeks and Latins, the Cyclops myth is an occidental and
not an oriental one, and is more strictly localised than almost any
other. This may be accounted for by saying that the sun's great fiery
eye is rather that of the setting than of the rising sun; that the
red-hot stake is the ruddy mountain peak, or the tall fir-trunk,
seen against the western horizon, and illumined by his descending
rays. But in the stories of Theocritus and Ovid, where the sun-myth
is not so apparent, the home of the Cyclops is still Sicily. Our first
Tartaro legend reads very like a rough outline of Ovid's story of "Acis
and Galatea." Now, W. Von Humboldt in his "Prüfung der Untersuchung
über die Urbewohner Hispaniens vermittelst der Vaskischen Sprache"
(Berlin, 1821), in cap. xlv., p. 167, and, again, con. vii., p. 178,
arguing on quite different grounds, places Sicily as the most easterly
habitation of the Basques within historic times. [10] We leave it then
to classical scholars to consider whether the Italic races in Magna
Græcia and Sicily may not have come in contact with the Basques there,
and from them have adopted their special form of the Cyclops legend.
As we said above, the Tartaro sometimes replaces the giant or the
ogre; at other times we find him as Basa-Jaun, or even as an animal,
substituted for Acheria, the fox. He is, in his proper form, a huge
one-eyed giant, occasionally a cannibal, but not without a rough
"bonhomie" when satiated with food and drink. Intellectually far below
the feebler race of mankind, he is invariably beaten in his contests
with them, notwithstanding his enormous strength; he loses all his
wagers, and is generally lured on to commit involuntary suicide. In
some aspects he reminds one of Milton's "Lubbar Fiend," and in his
constant defeats and being constantly outwitted, recals one of the
types of the Devil in mediæval story. At times he appears in gentler
guise, as when he aids the young prince to his rights, and supplies
Petit Yorge with the means of victory over the Heren-Suge. What the
talking ring is which appears in so many of these stories we confess
ourselves unable to interpret; it is found in the Keltic, but, as
far as we are aware, not in the classic legends.
One peculiarity of the Basque, and especially of the Tartaro legends,
is that the hero of them is so often a madman, an idiot, or a
fool. If we can trust our memory, the case is the same in the Slavonic
representatives of Odysseus. [11] But the Basques seem to dwell upon
and to repeat the idea in a peculiar way; they ring the changes on
all states, from the wild madman, like the Scandinavian Berserker,
through the idiot and fool, to the mere blockhead and ninny. Errua,
Enuchenta, Ergela, Sosua, Tontua, are terms employed to designate
the heroes who have sometimes, to our modern apprehension, little of
the idiot or fool, except the name. Can it be that the power which
put out the sun's fiery eye was looked upon as a beneficent being
in a burning tropic land, while, as the legend travelled northward,
the act seemed more like that of madness, or of senseless stupidity?
One type of these Tartaro tales will at once recal Grimm's "Valiant
Little Tailor," and some of the more modern versions of "Jack the
Giant-Killer." But though the incidents are identical, it is hardly
possible that they can be thus borrowed. Several of our narrators
were utterly ignorant of French, and learnt the tale as children
from old people, who died a few years since at upwards of 80. The
first translation of Grimm's Tales into French was published in the
year 1845.
THE TARTARO.
Once upon a time there was the son of a king who for the punishment
of some fault became a monster. He could become a man again only by
marrying. One day he met a young girl who refused him, because she
was so frightened at him. And the Tartaro wanted to give her a ring,
which she would not accept. However, he sent it her by a young man. As
soon as the ring was upon her finger it began to say, "Thou there,
and I here." [12] It kept always crying out this, and the Tartaro
pursued her continually; and, as the young girl had such a horror
of him, she cut off her finger and the ring, and threw them into a
large pond, and there the Tartaro drowned himself.
Estefanella Hirigarray,
of Ahetze.
M. D'ABBADIE'S VERSION.
Our next story was communicated by M. d'Abbadie to the Société des
Sciences et des Arts de Bayonne. The narrator is M. l'Abbé Heguiagaray,
the Parish Priest of Esquiule in La Soule:--
In my infancy I often heard from my mother the story of the Tartaro. He
was a Colossus, with only one eye in the middle of his forehead. He
was a shepherd and a hunter, but a hunter of men. Every day he ate
a sheep; then, after a snooze, every one who had the misfortune to
fall into his hands. His dwelling was a huge barn, with thick walls,
a high roof, and a very strong door, which he alone knew how to
open. His mother, an old witch, lived in one corner of the garden,
in a hut constructed of turf.
One day a powerful young man was caught in the snares of the Tartaro,
who carried him off to his house. This young man saw the Tartaro eat
a whole sheep, and he knew that he was accustomed to take a snooze,
and that after that his own turn would come. In his despair he said
to himself that he must do something. Directly the Tartaro began to
snore he put the spit into the fire, made it red-hot, and plunged it
into the giant's one eye. Immediately he leapt up, and began to run
after the man who had injured him; but it was impossible to find him.
"You shall not escape. It is all very well to hide yourself," said he;
"but I alone know the secret how to open this door."
The Tartaro opened the door half-way, and let the sheep out between
his legs. The young man takes the big bell off the ram, and puts it
round his neck, and throws over his body the skin of the sheep which
the giant had just eaten, and walks on all fours to the door.
The Tartaro examines him by feeling him, perceives the trick, and
clutches hold of the skin; but the young man slips off the skin,
dives between his legs, and runs off.
Immediately the mother of the Tartaro meets him, and says to him:
"O, you lucky young fellow! You have escaped the cruel tyrant; take
this ring as a remembrance of your escape."
He accepts, puts the ring on his finger, and immediately the ring
begins to cry out, "Heben nuk! Heben nuk!" ("Thou hast me here! Thou
hast me here!")
The Tartaro pursues, and is on the point of catching him, when the
young man, maddened with fright, and not being able to pull off the
ring, takes out his knife, and cuts off his own finger, and throws
it away, and thus escapes the pursuit of the Tartaro.
In other versions the young man goes into the forest with some pigs,
meets the Tartaro there, is carried by him home, blinds him with the
red-hot spit, and escapes by letting himself down through a garret
window. The Tartaro pursues, guided by his ring, which at last he
throws to the young man to put on, when it cries out as above, and
the young man cuts off his finger, and throws it down a precipice or
into a bog, where the ring still cries out, and the Tartaro following,
is dashed to pieces and drowned.
ERRUA, THE MADMAN.
Like many others in the world, there was a man and woman who had a
son. He was very wicked, and did nothing but mischief, and was of a
thoroughly depraved disposition. The parents decided that they must
send him away, and the lad was quite willing to set off.
He set out then, and goes far, far, far away. He comes to a city,
and asks if they want a servant. They wanted one in a (certain)
house. He goes there. They settle their terms at so much a month,
and that the one who is not satisfied should strip the skin off the
other's back. [13]
The master sends his servant to the forest to get the most crooked
pieces of wood that he can find. Near the forest there was a
vineyard. What does the servant do but cut it all up, and carries it
to the house. The master asks him where the wood is. He shows him
the vine-wood cut up. The master said nothing to him, but he was
not pleased.
Next day the master says to him, "Take the cows to such a field,
and don't break any hole in the fence."
What does the lad do? He cuts all the cows into little pieces, and
throws them bit by bit into the field. The master was still more
angry; but he could not say anything, for fear of having his skin
stripped off. So what does he do? He buys a herd of pigs, and sends
his servant to the mountain with the herd.
The master knew quite well that there was a Tartaro in this mountain,
but he sends him there all the same.
Our madman goes walking on, on, on. He arrives at a little hut. The
Tartaro's house was quite close to his. The pigs of the Tartaro and
those of the madman used to go out together. The Tartaro said one
day to him--
"Will you make a wager as to who will throw a stone farthest?"
He accepted the wager. That evening our madman was very sad. While
he was at his prayers, an old woman appeared to him, and asks him--
"What is the matter with you? Why are you so sad?"
He tells her the wager that he has made with the Tartaro. The old
woman says to him--
"If it is only that, it is nothing."
And so she gives him a bird, and says to him--
"Instead of a stone, throw this bird."
The madman was very glad at this. The next day he does as the old
woman told him. The Tartaro's stone went enormously far, but at last
it fell; but the madman's bird never came down at all.
The Tartaro was astonished that he had lost his wager, and they make
another--which of the two should throw a bar of iron the farthest. The
madman accepted again. He was in his little house sadly in prayer. The
old woman appears again. She asks him--
"What's the matter with you?"
"I have made a wager again, which of the two will throw the bar of
iron the farthest, and I am very sorry."
"If it is only that, it is nothing. When you take hold of the bar of
iron, say, 'Rise up, bar of iron, here and Salamanca.'" (Altchaala
palenka, hemen eta Salamanka.) [14]
Next day the Tartaro takes his terrible bar of iron, and throws
it fearfully far. The young man could hardly lift up one end, and
he says--
"Rise up, bar of iron, here and Salamanca."
When the Tartaro heard that (he cried out)--
"I give up the wager--you have won," and he takes the bar of iron away
from him. "My father and my mother live at Salamanca; don't throw,
I beg of you, I implore you--you will crush them."
Our madman goes away very happy.
The Tartaro says to him again:
"I will pull up the biggest oak in the forest, and you pull up
another."
He says, "Yes." And the later it grew in the day, the sadder he
became. He was at his prayers. The old woman comes to him again,
and says to him--
"What's the matter with you?"
He tells her the wager he has made with the Tartaro, and how he will
pull up an oak. The old woman gives him three balls of thread, and
tells him to begin and tie them to all the oaks in the forest. [15]
Next day the Tartaro pulls up his oak, an enormously, enormously big
one; and the madman begins to tie, and to tie, and to tie.
The Tartaro asks him:
"What are you doing that for?"
"You (pulled up) one, but I all these."
The Tartaro replies,
"No! No! No! What shall I do to fatten my pigs with without acorns? You
have won; you have won the wager."
The Tartaro did not know what to think about it, and saw that he had
found one cleverer than himself, and so he asks him if he will come
and spend the night at his house.
The madman says, "Yes."
He goes to bed then with the Tartaro. But he knew that there was a
dead man under the bed. When the Tartaro was asleep what does the
madman do? He places the dead man by the Tartaro's side, and gets
under the bed himself. In the middle of the night the Tartaro gets
up, and takes his terrible bar of iron and showers blows upon blows,
ping pan, ping pan, as long and as hard as he could give them.
The Tartaro gets up as usual, and goes to see his pigs, and the madman
also comes out from under the bed; and he goes to see the pigs too. The
Tartaro is quite astounded to see him coming, and does not know what
to think of it. He says to himself that he has to do with a cleverer
than he; but he asks him if he has slept well.
He answers, "Yes, very well; only I felt a few flea-bites."
Their pigs had got mixed, and as they were fat, he had to separate
them in order to go away with his. The Tartaro asked the madman what
mark his pigs had.
The madman says to him, "Mine have some of them one mark, some of
them two marks."
They set to work to look at them, and they all had these same marks.
Our madman goes off then with all the hogs. He goes walking on, on,
on, with all his pigs. He comes to a town where it was just market
day, and sells them all except two, keeping, however, all the tails,
which he put in his pockets. As you may think, he was always in
fear of the Tartaro. He sees him coming down from the mountain. He
kills one of his hogs, and puts the entrails in his own bosom under
his waistcoat. There was a group of men near the road. As he passed
them he took out his knife, and stabs it into his chest, and takes
out the pig's bowels, and our madman begins to run very much faster
than before, with his pig in front of him.
When the Tartaro comes up to these men, he asks if they have seen
such a man.
"Yes, yes, he was running fast, and in order to go faster just here
he stabbed himself, and threw away his bowels, and still he went on
all the faster."
The Tartaro, too, in order to go faster, thrusts his knife into his
body, and falls stark dead. [16]
The madman goes to his master's. Near the house there was a marsh
quite full of mud. He puts his live pig into it, and all the tails
too. He enters the house, and says to the master that he is there
with his pigs. The master is astounded to see him.
He asks him, "Where are the pigs, then?"
He says to him, "They have gone into the mud, they were so tired."
Both go out, and begin to get the real pig out, and between the two
they pull it out very well. They try to do the same thing with the
others; but they kept pulling out nothing but tails.
The madman says, "You see how fat they are; that is why the tails
come out alone."
He sends the servant to fetch the spade and the hoe. Instead of
bringing them he begins to beat the mistress, whack! whack! and he
cries to the master, "One or both?"
The master says to him, "Both, both."
And then he beats the servant maid almost to pieces. He goes then
to the master, taking with him the spade and the hoe, and he sets to
beating him with the spade and the hoe, until he can no longer defend
himself, and then he thrashes the skin off his back, and takes his
pig and goes off home to his father and mother; and as he lived well
he died well too.
Pierre Bertrand learnt it from his Grandmother, who died a few years
since, aged 82.
VARIATIONS OF ERRUA.
We have several variations of this tale, some like the above, very
similar to Grimm's "Valiant Little Tailor," others like Campbell's
"Highland Tales." In one tale there are two brothers, an idiot and a
fool (Enuchenta eta Ergela). The idiot goes out to service first, and
gets sent back for his stupidity. Then the fool goes, and outwits both
his master and the Tartaro, whose eye he burns out with a red-hot spit,
as in the first instance. In another the servant frightens the Tartaro
at the outset by cracking two walnuts, and saying that they were bones
of Christians he was cracking. Another wager is as to which shall carry
most water from a fountain. The Tartaro fills two hogsheads to carry,
but the lad says to him, "Only that; I will take the whole fountain;"
and he begins to stir the water about with a stick. But the Tartaro
cries out, "No! No! No! I give up. Where shall I go and drink if you
carry away all my water?" Another variation is as follows:--
THE THREE BROTHERS, THE CRUEL MASTER, AND THE TARTARO.
Like many others in the world, there lived a mother with her three
sons. They were not rich, but lived by their work. The eldest son
said one day to his mother--
"It would be better for us if I should go out to service."
The mother did not like it, but at last she let him go. He goes off,
far, far, far away, and comes to a house, and asks if they want a
servant. They say "Yes," and they make their agreement.
The master was to give a very high salary--100,000 francs--but the
servant was to do everything that the master ordered him, and, if he
did not do it, the master was to tear the skin off his back at the
end of the year, and to dismiss him without pay. [17]
The servant said to him,
"All right; I am strong, and I will work."
On the morrow the master gives him a great deal of work, but he does it
easily. The last months of the year the master presses him much more,
and one day he sends him into a field to sow fourteen bushels of wheat
in the day. The lad goes sadly, taking with him a pair of oxen. He
returns to the house very late in the evening. The master says to him,
"Have you done your work?"
He says, "No."
"Do you remember the agreement we made? I must tear the skin off your
back: that is your salary."
He tears the skin off, as he had said, and sends him away home without
anything. His mother was in great grief at seeing him come home so
thin and weak, and without any money.
He tells what has happened, and the second brother wishes to start off
at once, saying that he is strong, and that he will do more work. The
mother did not like it, but she was obliged to let him go.
He goes to the same house as his brother, and makes the same terms
with the master. When he had almost finished his year, his master
sends him too to sow fourteen bushels of wheat. He starts very early
in the morning, with two pair of oxen; but the night came before he
had sown it all. The master was very glad at the sight of that. He
strips his skin off his back also, and sends him away without any
money. Think of the vexation of this mother in seeing both her sons
return in this fashion.
The third wishes to start off at once. He assures his mother that
he will bring back both the money and the skin of his back. He goes
to this same gentleman. He tells this one, too, that he will give
him a high salary, on condition that he will do all that he shall
tell him to do, otherwise he shall have the skin torn off his back,
and be sent away without anything, at the end of the year.
He had made him work hard and well for ten months, and then wished
to try him. He sent him to the field, and told him to sow fourteen
bushels of wheat before night. He answers, "Yes."
He takes two pairs of oxen, and goes off to the field. He ploughs a
furrow all round the field, and throws his fourteen bushels of wheat
into it. He then makes another furrow, to cover it up, and at night
time he goes home to the house. The master is astonished. He asks
him if he has sown it.
"Yes, it is all under ground; you may be sure of it."
The master was not pleased; he had his fears.
The next day he sends him with sixteen head of cattle to such a field,
and says to him,
"You must take all these cattle into the field without unlocking the
gate or making a gap."
Our lad takes a hatchet, a hoe, and a fork. Off he goes, and when he
gets to the field he kills them all, one by one. He cuts them up with
the hatchet, and throws them with the fork into the field.
He comes home at nightfall, and says to his master that all the cattle
are in the field as he had told him. The master was not pleased,
but he said nothing.
The next day he told him to go to such a forest and to bring a load
of wood from there, but all the sticks quite, quite straight. Our lad
goes off and cuts down in the chestnut copse all the young chestnut
trees which his master had planted, and which were very fine ones;
and he comes home. When the master saw that, he was not pleased,
and said to him,
"To-morrow you shall go again with the oxen; and you must bring a
load of wood quite crooked, all quite crooked; if you bring only one
straight, so much the worse for you."
The lad goes off, and pulls up a fine vineyard. After he had loaded
his cart, he comes home. When the master saw that, he could not say
anything; but he did not know what to think of it.
He sends him into a forest. There was a Tartaro there; and all the
persons, and all the animals who went there, he ate them all. The
master gives him ten pigs, and also food for ten days, telling him
that the hogs would fatten themselves well there, because there were
plenty of acorns, and that he must return at the end of ten days.
Our lad begins, and he goes on, and on, and on. He meets an old woman,
who says to him:
"Where are you going to, lad?"
"To such a forest, to fatten these pigs."
The woman says to him:
"If you are not a fool, you will not go there. That horrible Tartaro
will eat you."
This woman was carrying a basket of walnuts on her head, and he said
to her:
"If you will give me two of these walnuts I will beat the Tartaro."
She willingly gives them to him, and he goes on, and on, and on. He
meets another old woman, who was winding thread. She says to him:
"Where are you going, lad?"
"To such a forest."
"Don't go there. There is a horrible Tartaro there, who will be sure
to eat you, and your pigs as well."
"I must go there all the same, and I will conquer him, if you will
give me two of your balls of thread."
She gives him them, willingly; and he goes on farther, and finds a
blacksmith, and he, too, asks him where he is going? And he answers,
"To such a forest, to fatten my pigs."
"You may just as well go back again. There is a terrible Tartaro there,
who will be sure to eat you."
"If you will give me a spit, I will beat him."
"I will give it you, willingly," and he gives it him with goodwill.
Our lad goes on, and comes to this forest. He cuts off the tails of
all his pigs, and hides them in a safe place. The Tartaro appears,
and says to him:
"How did you come here? I am going to eat you."
The lad says to him:
"Eat a pig if you like, but don't touch me."
He takes his two nuts, and rubs them one against the other.
"I have two balls here, and if one of them touches you, you are dead."
The Tartaro is frightened, and goes away in silence. After having
eaten a pig, he comes back again, and says to him:
"We must make a wager--which of the two will make the greatest heap
of wood?"
The Tartaro begins to cut and to cut. Our lad leaves him alone, and
when he has made a terrible big heap, he begins to go round all the
trees with his balls of thread, and says to him.
"You, that; but I, all this;" and he goes on tying and tying. The
Tartaro gives in, saying "that he is more clever than he." As he
had stopped his ten days, he makes in the night a great fire, and
makes his spit red-hot in it; and while the Tartaro was sleeping,
he plunges this spit into his only eye. After having taken his pigs'
tails, he goes away from the forest without any pigs, because the
Tartaro had eaten one every day. Near his master's house there was
"a well of the fairy." [18] Our lad sticks in there the tails of all
his hogs, excepting one, as well as he could. He then goes running
to his master, telling him that all the pigs were coming home very
gaily, and that they had got so hot in coming so fast that they
had all gone under the mud. "I wished to drag one out by pulling,
but only the tail came away; here it is."
He goes off then with the master to this marsh; but the master did
not dare go in there to pull them out. He goes off sadly with his
servant home, not knowing what to think about it. There he counts
him out his 100,000 francs, and he went home proudly to his mother
and his brothers. There they lived happily, and their master was left
with 100,000 francs less. That served him right for having so much.
THE TARTARO AND PETIT PERROQUET.
Like many others in the world, there was a mother and her son. They
were very wretched. One day the son said to his mother that he must go
away, to see if he could do anything. He goes far, far, far away. He
traverses many countries, and still goes on and on. He arrives in
a great city, and asks if they know of a place for a servant. They
tell him that there is one in the king's house. There they tell him
that he is to be gardener. But he tells them that he does not know
how to use a hoe at all, but that, all the same, he would learn it
with the others. He was very nice-looking. He soon learnt it, and
was liked by everybody.
This king had a daughter, and she often noticed Petit Perroquet,
because he was polite to everybody. In this city there was a prince,
and he was paying court to this young princess, and he was seized
with dislike and jealousy of Petit Perroquet. One day this prince
[19] went to find the king. He said to him,
"You do not know what Petit Perroquet says?--that he could bring the
Tartaro's horse here."
The king sends for Petit Perroquet, and says to him,
"It seems that you have said that you could bring the Tartaro's
horse here?"
"I certainly did not say it."
"Yes, yes," said the king, "you said it."
"If you will give me all that I ask for, I will try."
He asks for a great deal of money, and sets off. He travels on, and on,
and on, and he had to pass a wide river. He speaks to the ferryman,
and pays the passage money, and tells him that perhaps he will have
a heavy load on his return, but that he will be well paid.
He lands on the other side; but he had yet a long way to go in the
forest, because the Tartaro lived in a corner of the mountain. At last
he arrives, and knocks at the door. An old, old woman comes to him,
and says to him,
"Be off from here as quickly as possible; my son smells the smell of
a Christian a league off."
"To eat me here, or to eat me elsewhere, it is all the same to me."
But he goes outside, and hides himself under a great heap of cut
ferns. He had scarcely been there a moment, when he hears a deep
breathing and a grinding of teeth, which sounded like thunder. He
stops where he is, trembling. The Tartaro goes to his house, and asks
his mother if there is not some Christian or other hidden here.
"No, no," says she. "But eat away, your dinner is all ready."
"No, no! I must eat this Christian first."
He goes hunting, looking, looking into every corner. He goes to the
heap of ferns, and pulls off some to put them on one side; but our
Petit Perroquet was quite, quite at the bottom. The Tartaro was just
on the point of finding him, but he grew tired, and went indoors, and
began to eat and to drink enormously. Our Petit Perroquet creeps out of
his ferns, and goes off to the stable. The horse had a big bell round
his neck, but he fills it with ferns (this bell was as large as the
big bell in the church of St. Jean de Luz). He mounts on the horse's
back, and very soon he arrives at the ferry, and the ferryman comes
to meet him. Together they get the horse into the ferry-boat as well
as they could, and they cross over. He gave him a handsome reward. As
soon as he was on the other side, the Tartaro appeared, crying out to
him to give him his horse back again, and that he would give him all
he could wish for. He replies, "No," and goes off full gallop. When
he came near the king's palace he took the fern out of the bell,
and everybody comes running out of doors or to the windows. All the
world was astonished to see Petit Perroquet return.
The king was in ecstasy. He did not know what to say, but he liked
him even more than he did formerly, and the princess did also. The
other prince was not at all pleased, and he begins to think of some
other plot. He goes off to find the king, and he says to him,
"Do you not know that Petit Perroquet says that he could bring the
Tartaro's diamond?"
The king sends for Petit Perroquet, and says to him,
"It seems that you say you can get the Tartaro's diamond?"
"I certainly did not say any such thing."
"Yes, yes--you said it."
"No, no! I did not say it; but I will try, if you give me all I shall
ask for."
And he asks for a great deal of money.
He goes off, and reaches the ferry, and pays the ferryman well, and
goes far, far, far away into the forest, till he gets to the house
of the Tartaro. The old woman tells him to be off from there; and he
goes and hides himself again in the ferns. And he stops there until
the Tartaro comes to the house, just as he did the first time. He
turns over nearly all the ferns, and leaves him scarcely covered. He
stops quietly there all the time that the Tartaro was having his huge
supper, and when he thinks he has finished, and is taking his nap,
he creeps out very, very gently. The Tartaro always put his diamond
under his pillow, and he takes it away without waking him, and escapes,
running off as fast as if to break his feet. The ferryman is there,
and he crosses him over, and he pays him well. The Tartaro appears
on the other side again, and calls out to him telling him to give
him back his diamond, and that he would give him all that he could
wish for. He answers, "No, no!" and runs on to the king's house.
When he arrived there, the king did not know what to do. One feasted
him, and another feasted him, and all the world was busied about him,
and everyone loved him more and more, and the princess as well as
the rest. The wicked prince did not know what to think of it. He was
eaten up with jealousy, and he thought of something else, and said
to the king:
"Petit Perroquet says that he can bring the Tartaro himself."
The king sends for Petit Perroquet, and says to him:
"It appears that you have said that you will bring the Tartaro
himself here."
"No, no, no, I did not say anything at all like that; but if you will
give me all I ask for, I will try. You must have a carriage made of
iron, half-a-yard thick, and three horses to draw it, and lots of
money. When all that is ready, I will set out."
He asks, also, for a barrel of honey, another of feathers, and two
horns, and starts off.
When he comes to the ferry, it was no easy thing to get this carriage
into the boat. When he has got to the other side, he first puts
himself into the barrel of honey, and then into the barrel of feathers,
and ties the horns on to his head, and then mounts as postilion. He
then comes to the Tartaro's house, and just then he happened to be at
home. Petit Perroquet knocks at the door. The Tartaro himself comes
to open, and asks:
"Who are you? You!"
"I!!--I am the oldest of all the devils in hell."
He opens the carriage door for him, and says:
"Get in there."
The Tartaro gets in, and Petit Perroquet, very glad, starts off, and
arrives at the ferry. He crosses, as he best can, with his carriage
and horses. He pays the ferryman generously, and comes to the king's
palace. They were all terrified when they saw that he had the Tartaro
there. They tried to shoot him with cannon, but he caught the bullets,
and sent them back as if they had been balls to play with. They could
not kill him in that way, so they finished him with other arms.
As Petit Perroquet had well gained her, they gave him the princess in
marriage. He sent for his mother to the court, and as they lived well,
so they died happily.
Pierre Bertrand.
II--THE HEREN-SUGE.--THE SEVEN-HEADED SERPENT.
It would only be spoiling good work by bad to attempt to re-write the
exhaustive essay which appears, under the heading of "St. George," in
Baring Gould's "Curious Myths of the Middle Ages." He there traces the
atmospheric myth in which the Dragon is the storm-cloud, the Maiden the
earth, and the Hero the sun, through all the forms of the great Aryan
legend, in Indian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Italic, Keltic, Teutonic,
and Scandinavian mythology. He shows that it was merely by a mistaken
metaphor [20] that St. George came to assume the place, and wear the
glories of the solar hero; and that England only followed in the wake
of other countries, in making him her national Saint and Patron.
We will, therefore, now only glance at some of the Basque and Pyrenean
forms of this wide-spread myth. M. Cerquand boldly places one form of
the story, which is attached to the house of Belzunce, among historical
legends. But the history of Belzunce and the Dragon stands in the same
relation to the original myth as does that of Guy, Earl of Warwick,
Moor of Moor Hall, and of scores of other heroes. In a Basque version,
collected by ourselves, the concluding words show that in this form
it is simply an Eponymous legend, to account for the name, "and that
is whence comes the name of Belzunce." The oldest Pyrenean version
with which we are acquainted is that of the "Serpent d'Isabit." We
give the outlines of it from memory, as we heard, and read it, at
Bagnères de Bigorre.
The serpent lay with his head resting on the summit of the Pic du
Midi de Bigorre, his neck stretched down towards Barèges, while his
body filled the whole valley of Luz, St. Sauveur, and Gédres, and
his tail was coiled in the hollow below the cirque of Gavarnie. He
fed but once in three months, or the whole country would have been
desolate. With a strong inspiration of his breath, he drew into his
capacious maw, across the valleys, whole flocks of sheep and goats,
herds of oxen, men, women, children, the population of whole villages
at once. He was now asleep, and inert, after such a repast. The whole
male population of several valleys assembled to consult on what
should be done. After long and fruitless debate an old man arose
and spoke:--"We have nearly three months yet before he will wake;
let us cut down all the forests on the opposite hills; then let us
bring all our forges and all the iron we possess, and with the wood
thus cut down let us melt it all into one red-hot fiery mass; then we
will hide ourselves behind the rocks, and make all the noise we can
to try and awaken the monster." So said, so done. The serpent awoke
in a rage at having his slumbers broken, he saw something bright on
the opposite side of the valley, and drew in a long breath, and the
fiery mass, with a roar like a thunderbolt, flew across the valley,
right down the monster's throat. Then, what convulsions ensued;
rocks were uptorn or split open, the mountains were shattered, the
glaciers beaten into dust as the serpent twisted and lashed about in
his agony. To quench his agony of thirst he descended to the valley,
and drank up all the streams from Gavarnie to Pierrefitte. Then,
in his last convulsion, he threw himself back upon the mountain side
and expired; his head rested in a deep hollow; as the fire within him
slowly cooled, the water he had swallowed poured out of his mouth,
and formed the present Lac d'Isabit. In M. Cerquand's legend of the
Dragon d'Alçay, the red-hot iron is replaced by "a cow's skin full
of gunpowder." In all the Basque legends of this class the hero dies.
But these legends differ widely from the following tales; there is
in them no princess to be rescued, no charcoal-burner, no marriage,
or any other wonders. Were it not for their still closer resemblance
to the Gaelic tales, we should suspect the following legends to
be simply translations of some French legend of St. George. As we
remarked before, like the Deccan cobras, the Heren-Suge is always
seven-headed. It is strange, too, to notice that the princess always
behaves in the same chivalrous way. "One is enough to die." The union,
too, of Tartaro and Heren-Suge in the same tale is curious.
THE GRATEFUL TARTARO AND THE HEREN-SUGE.
Like many of us who are, have been, and shall be in the world, there
was a king, and his wife, and three sons. The king went out hunting
one day, and caught a Tartaro. He brings him home, and shuts him up
in prison in a stable, and proclaims, by sound of trumpet, that all
his court should meet the next day at his house, that he would give
them a grand dinner, and afterwards would show them an animal such
as they had never seen before.
The next day the two sons of the king were playing at ball against
(the wall of) the stable where the Tartaro was confined, and the ball
went into the stable. One of the boys goes and asks the Tartaro--
"Throw me back my ball, I beg you."
He says to him, "Yes, if you will deliver me."
He replies, "Yes, yes," and he threw him the ball.
A moment after, the ball goes again to the Tartaro. He asks for it
again; and the Tartaro says:
"If you will deliver me, I will give it you."
The boy says, "Yes, yes," takes his ball, and goes off.
The ball goes there for the third time, but the Tartaro will not give
it before he is let out. The boy says that he has not the key. The
Tartaro says to him:
"Go to your mother, and tell her to look in your right ear, because
something hurts you there. Your mother will have the key in her left
pocket, and take it out."
The boy goes, and does as the Tartaro had told him. He takes the key
from his mother, and delivers the Tartaro. When he was letting him go,
he said to him:
"What shall I do with the key now? I am undone."
The Tartaro says to him:
"Go again to your mother, and tell her that your left ear hurts you,
and ask her to look, and you will slip the key into her pocket."
The Tartaro tells him, too, that he will soon have need of him,
and that he will only have to call him, and he will be his servant
for ever.
He puts the key back; and everyone came to the dinner. When they
had eaten well, the king said to them that they must go and see this
curious thing. He takes them all with him. When they are come to the
stable, he finds it empty. Judge of the anger of this king, and of
his shame. He said:
"I should like to eat the heart, half cooked, and without salt,
of him who has let my beast go."
Some time afterwards the two brothers quarreled in presence of their
mother, and one said to the other:
"I will tell our father about the affair of the Tartaro."
When the mother heard that, she was afraid for her son, and said
to him:
"Take as much money as you wish."
And she gave him the Fleur-de-lis. [21] "By this you will be known
everywhere as the son of a king."
Petit Yorge [22] goes off, then, far, far, far away. He spends
and squanders all his money, and does not know what to do more. He
remembers the Tartaro, and calls him directly. He comes, and Petit
Yorge tells him all his misfortunes; that he has not a penny left, and
that he does not know what will become of him. The Tartaro says to him:
"When you have gone a short way from here you will come to a city. A
king lives there. You will go to his house, and they will take you as
gardener. You will pull up everything that there is in the garden, and
the next day everything will come up more beautiful than before. Also,
three beautiful flowers will spring up, and you will carry them to
the three daughters of the king, and you will give the most beautiful
to the youngest daughter." [23]
He goes off, then, as he had told him, and he asks them if they want a
gardener. They say, "Yes, indeed, very much." He goes to the garden,
and pulls up the fine cabbages, and the beautiful leeks as well. The
youngest of the king's daughters sees him, and she tells it to her
father, and her father says to her:
"Let him alone, we will see what he will do afterwards." And, indeed,
the next day he sees cabbages and leeks such as he had never seen
before. Petit Yorge takes a flower to each of the young ladies. The
eldest said:
"I have a flower that the gardener has brought me, which has not its
equal in the world."
And the second says that she has one, too, and that no one has ever
seen one so beautiful. And the youngest said that hers was still more
beautiful than theirs, and the others confess it, too. The youngest of
the young ladies found the gardener very much to her taste. Every day
she used to bring him his dinner. After a certain time she said to him,
"You must marry me."
The lad says to her,
"That is impossible. The king would not like such a marriage."
The young girl says, too,
"Well, indeed, it is hardly worth while. In eight days I shall be
eaten by the serpent."
For eight days she brought him his dinner again. In the evening she
tells him that it is for the last time that she brought it. The young
man tells her, "No," that she will bring it again; that somebody will
help her.
The next day Petit Yorge goes off at eight o'clock to call the
Tartaro. He tells him what has happened. The Tartaro gives him a fine
horse, a handsome dress, and a sword, and tells him to go to such a
spot, and to open the carriage door with his sword, and that he will
cut off two of the serpent's heads. Petit Yorge goes off to the said
spot. He finds the young lady in the carriage. He bids her open the
door. The young lady says that she cannot open it--that there are
seven doors, and that he had better go away; that it is enough for
one person to be eaten.
Petit Yorge opens the doors with his sword, and sat down by the young
lady's side. He tells her that he has hurt his ear, and asks her to
look at it; [24] and at the same time he cuts off seven pieces of
the seven robes which she wore, without the young lady seeing him. At
the same instant comes the serpent, and says to him,
"Instead of one, I shall have three to eat."
Petit Yorge leaps on his horse, and says to him,
"You will not touch one; you shall not have one of us."
And they begin to fight. With his sword he cuts off one head, and the
horse with his feet another; [25] and the serpent asks quarter till the
next day. Petit Yorge leaves the young lady there. The young lady is
full of joy; she wishes to take the young man home with her. He will
not go by any means (he says); that he cannot; that he has made a vow
to go to Rome; but he tells her that "to-morrow my brother will come,
and he will be able to do something, too." The young lady goes home,
and Petit Yorge to his garden. At noon she comes to him with the
dinner, and Petit Yorge says to her,
"You see that it has really happened as I told you--he has not
eaten you."
"No, but to-morrow he will eat me. How can it be otherwise?"
"No, no! To-morrow you will bring me my dinner again. Some help will
come to you."
The next day Petit Yorge goes off at eight o'clock to the Tartaro,
who gives him a new horse, a different dress, and a fine sword. At
ten o'clock he arrives where the young lady is. He bids her open the
door. But she says to him that she cannot in any way open fourteen
doors; she is there, and that she cannot open them, and he should go
away; that it is enough for one to be eaten; that she is grieved to see
him there. As soon as he has touched them with his sword, the fourteen
doors fly open. He sits down by the side of the young lady, and tells
her to look behind his ear, for it hurts him. At the same time he
cuts off fourteen bits of the fourteen dresses she was wearing. As
soon as he had done that, the serpent comes, saying joyfully,
"I shall eat not one, but three."
Petit Yorge says to him, "Not even one of us."
He leaps on his horse, and begins to fight with the serpent. The
serpent makes some terrible bounds. After having fought a long time,
at last Petit Yorge is the conqueror. He cuts off one head, and the
horse another with his foot. The serpent begs quarter till the next
day. Petit Yorge grants it, and the serpent goes away.
The young lady wishes to take the young man home, to show him to
her father; but he will not go by any means. He tells her that he
must go to Rome, and set off that very day; that he has made a vow,
but that to-morrow he will send his cousin, who is very bold, and is
afraid of nothing.
The young lady goes to her father's, Petit Yorge to his garden. Her
father is delighted, and cannot comprehend it at all. The young lady
goes again with the dinner. The gardener says to her,
"You see you have come again to-day, as I told you. To-morrow you
will come again, just the same."
"I should be very glad of it."
On the morrow Petit Yorge went off at eight o'clock to the Tartaro. He
said to him that the serpent had still three heads to be cut off,
and that he had still need of all his help. The Tartaro said to him,
"Keep quiet, keep quiet; you will conquer him."
He gives him a new dress, finer than the others, a more spirited horse,
a terrible dog, [26] a sword, and a bottle of good scented water. [27]
He said to him,
"The serpent will say to you, 'Ah! if I had a spark between my head and
my tail, how I would burn you and your lady, and your horse and your
dog.' And you, you will say to him then, 'I, if I had the good-scented
water to smell, I would cut off a head from thee, the horse another,
and the dog another.' You will give this bottle to the young lady,
who will place it in her bosom, and, at the very moment you shall
say that, she must throw some in your face, and on the horse and on
the dog as well."
He goes off then without fear, because the Tartaro had given him this
assurance. He comes then to the carriage. The young lady says to him,
"Where are you going? The serpent will be here directly. It is enough
if he eats me."
He says to her, "Open the door."
She tells him that it is impossible; that there are twenty-one
doors. This young man touches them with his sword, and they open of
themselves. This young man says to her, giving her the bottle,
"When the serpent shall say, 'If I had a spark between my head and
my tail, I would burn you,' I shall say to him, 'If I had a drop
of the good-scented water under my nose;' you will take the bottle,
and throw some over me in a moment."
He then makes her look into his ear, and, while she is looking, he
cuts off twenty-one pieces from her twenty-one dresses that she was
wearing. At the same moment comes the serpent, saying, with joy,
"Instead of one, I shall have four to eat."
The young man said to him,
"And you shall not touch one of us, at any rate."
He leaps on his spirited horse, and they fight more fiercely than
ever. The horse leaped as high as a house, and the serpent, in a rage,
says to him,
"If I had a spark of fire between my tail and my head, I would burn
you and your lady, and this horse and this terrible dog."
The young man says,
"I, if I had the good-scented water under my nose, I would cut off
one of your heads, and the horse another, and the dog another."
As he said that, the young lady jumps up, opens the bottle, and very
cleverly throws the water just where it was wanted. The young man cuts
off a head with his sword, his horse another, and the dog another;
and thus they make an end of the serpent. This young man takes the
seven tongues with him, and throws away the heads. Judge of the joy
of this young lady. She wanted to go straight to her father with her
preserver (she says), that her father must thank him too; that he
owes his daughter to him. But the young man says to her that it is
altogether impossible for him; that he must go and meet his cousin
at Rome; that they have made a vow, and that, on their return, all
three will come to her father's house.
The young lady is vexed, but she goes off without losing time to tell
her father what has happened. The father is very glad that the serpent
was utterly destroyed; and he proclaims in all the country that he
who has killed the serpent should come forward with the proofs of it.
The young lady goes again with the dinner to the gardener. He says
to her,
"I told you true, then, that you would not be eaten? Something has,
then, killed the serpent?"
She relates to him what had taken place.
But, lo! some days afterwards there appeared a black charcoal-burner,
who said that he had killed the serpent, and was come to claim
the reward. When the young lady saw the charcoal-burner, she said
immediately, that most certainly it was not he; that it was a fine
gentleman, on horseback, and not a pest of a man like him. The
charcoal-burner shows the heads of the serpent; and the king says
that, in truth, this must be the man. The king had only one word to
say, she must marry him. The young lady says, she will not at all;
and the father began to compel her, (saying) that no other man came
forward. But, as the daughter would not consent, to make a delay,
the king proclaims in all the country, that he who killed the serpent
would be capable of doing something else, too, and that, on such a
day, all the young men should assemble, that he would hang a diamond
ring from a bell, and that whosoever riding under it should pierce
the ring with his sword, should certainly have his daughter. [28]
From all sides arrive the young men. Our Petit Yorge goes off to the
Tartaro, and tells him what has happened, and that he has again need
of him. The Tartaro gives him a handsome horse, a superb dress, and
a splendid sword. Equipped thus, Petit Yorge goes with the others. He
gets ready. The young lady recognizes him immediately, and says so to
her father. He has the good luck to carry off the ring on his sword;
but he does not stop at all, but goes off galloping as hard as his
horse can go. The king and his daughter were in a balcony, looking
on at all these gentlemen. They saw that he still went on. The young
lady says to her father:
"Papa, call him!"
The father says to her, in an angry tone,
"He is going off, because apparently he has no desire to have you." And
he hurls his lance at him. It strikes him on the leg. He still rides
on. You can well imagine what chagrin for the young lady.
The next day she goes with the gardener's dinner. She sees him with
his leg bandaged. She asks him what it is.
The young lady begins to suspect something, and goes to tell to her
father how the gardener had his leg tied up, and that he must go and
ask him what is the matter. That he had told her that it was nothing.
The king did not want to go, (and said) that she must get it out of
the gardener; but to please his daughter, he says he will go there. He
goes then, and asks him, "What is the matter?" He tells him that
a blackthorn has run into him. The king gets angry, and says "that
there is not a blackthorn in all his garden, and that he is telling
him a lie."
The daughter says to him,
"Tell him to show it us."
He shows it to them, and they are astonished to see that the lance
is still there. The king did not know what to think of it all. This
gardener has deceived him, and he must give him his daughter. But Petit
Yorge, uncovering his bosom, shows the "fleur-de-lis" there. The king
did not know what to say; but the daughter said to him,
"This is my preserver, and I will marry no one else than him."
Petit Yorge asks the king to send for five dressmakers, the best in
the town, and five butchers. The king sends for them.
Petit Yorge asks the dressmakers if they have ever made any new dresses
which had a piece out; and on the dressmakers saying "No," he counts
out the pieces and gives them to the dressmakers, asking if it was
like that that they had given the dresses to the princess. They say,
"Certainly not."
He goes, then, to the butchers, and asks them, if they have ever
killed animals without tongues? They say, "No!" He tells them, then,
to look in the heads of the serpent. They see that the tongues are
not there, and then he takes out the tongues he has.
The king, having seen all that, has nothing more to say. He gives
him his daughter. Petit Yorge says to him, that he must invite his
father to the wedding, but on the part of the young lady's father;
and that they must serve him up at dinner a sheep's heart, half cooked,
and without salt. They make a great feast, and place this heart before
this father. They make him carve it himself, and he is very indignant
at that. The son then says to him:
"I expected that;" and he adds, "Ah! my poor father, have you
forgotten how you said that you wished to eat the heart, half cooked,
and without salt, of him who let the Tartaro go? That is not my heart,
but a sheep's heart. I have done this to recall to your memory what
you said, and to make you recognize me."
They embrace each other, and tell each other all their news, and what
services the Tartaro had done him. The father returned happy to his
house, and Petit Yorge lived very happily with his young lady at the
king's house; and they wanted nothing, because they had always the
Tartaro at their service.
Laurentine.
In a variation of the above tale, from the narration of Mariño
Amyot, of St. Jean Pied de Port, the young prince, as a herdsman,
kills with a hammer successively three Tartaros who play at cards
with him; he then finds in their house all their riches and horses,
barrels full of gold and silver, etc., and also three "olano,"
which is described as an animal who serves the Tartaro, like a dog,
but much larger and more terrible, but also more intelligent and able
to do any message. He kills the serpent with the aid of the "olanos,"
and the princess helps by striking the serpent's tail with a sword,
[29] instead of sprinkling the "sweet-scented water." The "olano" then
steals dishes off the king's table for the prince. The charcoal-burner
comes; but at last the prince shows the tongues and pieces of dress,
and all ends happily, except for the charcoal-burner, who is placed
on the top of seven barrels of powder, and fire is applied beneath,
and then nobody sees him any more.
The commencement of the next is so different that we give it at length.
THE SEVEN-HEADED SERPENT.
Like many others in the world, there was a mother with her three
sons. The eldest said to her that he wished to go from country to
country, until he should find a situation as servant, and that she
should give him a cake.
He sets out. While he is going through a forest he meets an old
woman, who asks him for a morsel of his cake. [30] He says to her,
"No!" that he would prefer to throw it into the muddy clay. And the
lad asks her if she knows of a servant's place. She says, "No." He
goes on from forest to forest, until the night overtakes him. There
comes to him a bear. He says to him,
"Ant of the earth! who has given you permission to come here?"
"Who should give it me? I have taken it myself."
And the bear devours him.
The second son asks his mother to give him a cake, for he wishes to
go as a servant, like his brother. She gives him one, and he goes
away like his brother. He meets an old woman, who says to him,
"Give me a little of your cake."
"I prefer to throw it into this muddy clay rather than to give you
any of it."
He asks her if she knows of a servant's place. She replies, "No." And
on he goes, on, on, on, deeper into the forest. He meets a huge
bear. He says to him,
"Ant of the earth! Who has given you permission to come here?"
"Who should give it me? I have taken it myself."
And the bear devours him.
The third son asks his mother to give him a cake, for he wishes to
go off, like his brothers. He sets off, and walks on, and on, and
on. And he finds an old woman. She asks him,
"Where are you going?"
"I want a situation as servant."
"Give me a little bit of your cake."
"Here! Take the whole as well, if you like."
"No, no! A little bit is enough for me."
And he asks her if she knows of a servant's place. She says to him,
"Yes; you will find it far beyond the forest. But you will meet an
enemy here; but I will give you a stick, with the touch of which you
may kill him." [31]
He goes on, and on, and on. There comes to him a bear, and says to him,
"Ant of the ground! Who has given you permission to come here?"
"Who has given it me? I have taken it myself."
The lad gives him a little blow with his stick, and the bear gives
a howl--
"Oy, oy, oy!--spare my life! Oy, oy, oy!--spare my life!"
But he said to him,
"Tell me, then, how many you are in the place where you live?"
"Seven."
He gives him another blow, and he falls stark dead.
He goes on, on, on, until he finds a palace. He goes in, and asks,
"Do you want a servant?"
They say to him,
"Yes, yes; our shepherd has gone away, and we want one."
They send him to bed; and the next day they give him a fine flock of
sheep, and tell him not to go on the mountain, because it is full of
large and savage animals, and to pay great attention, because the sheep
always want to go there. The next day he goes off with his sheep, and
all of them run away to this mountain, because the herbage was very
good there. Our shepherd had, fortunately, not forgotten his stick,
for at that moment there appeared before him a terrible bear.
"Who has given you permission to come here?"
"I have taken it myself."
"I must eat you."
He approaches, but our shepherd gives him a little blow with his stick,
and he begins to cry out,
"Oy, oy, oy!--spare my life!"
"Tell me, then, how many you are where you live?"
"We were seven yesterday, but to-day we are only six, with me."
He gives him another blow, and he falls stark dead. And the shepherd
hides him as well as he can in a hedge, and then he returns home
with his sheep, well filled. That evening the sheep gave him a great
deal of milk, and he made fine cheeses with it. [32] The master and
mistress were delighted to have such a servant. The next day he goes
off again. As soon as he opened the stable-door the sheep start off
running to the good pasture and fine herbage, and the same things
(happen again). At the end of a moment there appears a bear, who asks
him why he comes there into those parts. Our shepherd, with his stick,
gives him a little blow on the neck, and the bear begins to cry,
"Ay, ay, ay!--spare my life!"
He asks him,
"How many are you there where you live?"
"We were seven, but at present we are five with me."
And he gives him a little blow, and he falls stiff and dead. And in
five days he kills all the bears in the same way; and when he saw
the last one come, he was frightened to see a beast so immense and
so fearful, and which came dragging himself along, he was so old. He
says to him,
"Why have you come into these parts?"
And at the same time the shepherd gives him a little blow. He begins
to cry out to him to spare his life, and that he would give him great
riches and beautiful apartments, and that they should live together. He
spares his life, and sends the flock back to the house. They go through
hedges and hedges, and "through the fairies' holes," [33] and arrive
at last at a fine palace. There they find the table set out with every
kind of food and drink. There were also servants to attend on them,
and there were also horses all ready saddled, and with harness of
gold and silver. There was nothing but riches there. After having
passed some days there like that, our shepherd said to himself that
it would be better to be master and owner of all that fortune. So he
gives a blow to the bear, and kills him stark dead.
After having dressed himself splendidly, he gets on horseback,
and goes from country to country, and comes to a city, and hears
the bells sounding, dilin-don, dilin-don, and all the people are in
excitement. He asks, "What is the matter?" They tell him how that there
is in the mountain a serpent with seven heads, and that one person must
be given to him every day. This serpent has seven heads. They draw
lots to know who must be given to the serpent. The lot had fallen
on the king's daughter, and every one was in grief and distress,
and all were going, with the king at their head, to accompany her
to the mountain. They left her at the foot of the mountain, and she
went on mounting alone to the top. This young man goes after her,
and says to her,
"I will accompany you."
The king's daughter says to him,
"Turn back, I beg you. I do not wish you to risk your life because
of me."
He says to her,
"Have no fear for me. I have a charm of might."
At the same time they hear an extraordinary noise and hissing,
and he sees the serpent coming like the lightning. As our man has
his stick with him, he gives him a little blow on one of his heads,
and one by one the seven heads fall off, and our princess is saved.
In order to go to the mountain, she was dressed in her most beautiful
robes. She had seven of them on. He took a little piece from each of
the seven robes, and he likewise takes the tongue from each of the
heads, and puts them in these little pieces of silk. He then takes the
king's daughter on his horse, and descends the mountain. The daughter
goes home to her father, and our gentleman to the bear's house. The
news that the seven-headed serpent is killed spreads quickly. The
king had promised his daughter, and the half of his kingdom, to the
man who should have killed him. The serpent was killed, as we have
said. Three charcoal-burners, passing by on the mountain, see the
serpent, and take the seven heads, and go to the king, asking to
have a reward. But, as they were three, they were in a difficulty;
and they were sent away until the council was assembled, and to see
if any other person would come. As nobody appeared, they were going
to draw lots who should be the husband of the king's daughter. There
was great excitement that day, and there was also a great stir when
this young man arrived in the city. He asks what it is. They tell
him what it is. He was splendidly dressed, and had a magnificent
horse. He asks to see the king, and, as he was handsomely dressed,
he is received immediately. He asks if the seven heads of the serpent
had seven tongues in them; and they cannot find them. Then he shows
the seven tongues. He sends, too, for the princess' seven robes,
and he shows the seven pieces that are wanting, as well as the seven
tongues. When they see that, all exclaim--
"This is the true saviour of the king's daughter!"
And they are married.
The three charcoal-burners, after having been dressed in a coat of
sulphur, were burnt alive in the midst of the market-place.
Our gentleman and lady lived very happily, sometimes at her father's
house and at other times at their own bear's-house; and, as they had
lived well, they died happily. Then I was there, and now I am here.
Our next tale will show the serpent in a new character, and might
have been included under the variations of "Beauty and the Beast."
THE SERPENT IN THE WOOD.
Like many others in the world, there was a widower who had three
daughters. One day the eldest said to her father, that she must go
and see the country. She walked on for two hours, and saw some men
cutting furze, and others mowing hay.
She returned to the house, astonished at having seen such wonderful
things. She told her father what wonderful things she had seen,
and her father replied:
"Men cutting furze! Men mowing hay!!"
The second daughter asks, too, to go like her sister, and she returned
after having seen the same things. And the third daughter said that
she ought to go, too.
"Child, what will you see?"
"I, like my sisters, something or other."
She set off on the same road as the others; and she, like the others,
saw men cutting furze, and men mowing hay. She went on further,
and she saw some washerwomen; and she went still a little further on
till she had walked for three hours, and she saw some wood-cutters
cutting firewood. She asked them if she should see anything more if
she went a little further. They told her that she would see some more
wood-cutters cutting firewood.
She went very much farther into the wood, and she was caught, and kept
prisoner by a serpent. She remained there crying, and not able to eat
anything; and she remained like that eight days, very sad; then she
began to grow resigned, and she remained there three years. At the end
of three years she began to wish to return home. The serpent told her
to come back again at the end of two days; that his time was nearly
finished, and that he was a king's son condemned for four years [34]
(to be a serpent). He gave her a distaff and spindle, of silver-gilt,
and a silk handkerchief. He said to her:
"If you do not find me here on your return, you will have to wear
out seven pairs of shoes, six of leather and one pair of iron ones
(before you will be able to find me)."
When she came home, her father would not let her go back to the house
where she had passed such a long time with a son of a king, condemned
to be a serpent. She said that his time was almost finished, and that
in gratitude she ought to return; that he had said that he would marry
her. The father had her put in prison, confined in a room very high
up. The fourth day she escaped, and went to the place, but she did not
find the king's son. She had already shoes on her feet. She had almost
worn them out. After that she bought another pair. She kept journeying
on and on, and asking if it were far, and they told her that it was
very far. She bought still another pair of shoes, and these, too,
got worn out on the road. She bought a fifth pair, and after them
the sixth also. She then asked if she were near yet, and they told
her that she was still very far. Then she bought the seventh pair of
shoes, of iron. And when she had gone a short way in these shoes,
she asked if it were far from there to the son of the king. The
seventh pair of shoes were almost worn out when she came to a city,
and heard sounds of music. She inquired what was happening in the city.
"Such a king's son is being married to-day."
She went to the house, and knocked at the door. A servant came.
"What do you want?"
She asked if there were any work to spin, and she would spin it.
And the servant went to tell it to the mistress. The lady ordered
the servant to bring her in. She brought her in. And when she was
in the kitchen, she showed the silk handkerchief which the king's
son had given her; and she began to blow her nose with that. The
lady was quite astonished to see the girl blow her nose with such a
beautiful handkerchief, as if it were nothing, [35] when her son had
one just like it for his marriage-day. So she told her son, when he
came back from the church, that she had a spinster who came from a
great distance, and said to him:
"She has a silk handkerchief just like yours!"
And the king's son said to his mother:
"I, too, must see this spinster that you have there." And he began
to go there.
And his mother said to him,
"But why must you see her?"
"I wish to see her."
He went to the kitchen, and in his presence she used her silk
handkerchief.
He said to her,
"Show me that."
She said to him,
"It is too dirty to put into your hands, sir."
The gentleman says to her,
"I wish to see it, and show it to me."
(Then) he recognised the young girl. She showed him (too) the distaff
and spindle.
At table, when everybody was engaged telling stories, this king said:
"I also have a story to tell."
Everybody was silent, and turned to look at him, and he said:
"Formerly, I had a key to a chest of drawers, and I lost it, and had
a new one made. (After that, I found the old one.)"
And he turned to his wife:
"Should I use the old one or the new one?"
And she replied:
"If the first was a good one, why should you make use of the new one?"
Then he gave her this answer:
"Formerly, I had a wife, and now I have taken you. I leave you,
and take the former one. Do you go off, then, to your own house."
Gagna-haurra Hirigaray.
(Learnt at Guethary.)
For the version of the Heren-Suge tales which most closely approaches
the Gaelic, see below, "Keltic Legends," "The Fisherman and his Sons,"
p. 87.
III.--ANIMAL TALES.
We give two stories as specimens of animal tales, which are neither
allegories, nor fables, and still less satires. The reader must
remember the phrase, "This happened when animals and all things could
talk." So thoroughly is this believed, that the first tale of this
class recited to us completely puzzled us. The animals are in them
placed so fully on a footing with human beings--not in the least as
our "poor relations," but rather as sharper-witted, and quite as
happy and well off as ourselves--that it is difficult at times to
determine whether it is the beast or the man who is the speaker.
Of the latter part of our first story we have heard many variations. In
one given by M. Cerquand, p. 29, note, [36] the fox is represented by
Basa-Jauna; in a version from Baigorry, by the Tartaro; but in three
others, from separate localities, he is a fox. The first two truths are
the same in all the versions. In that here given, the fun is heightened
by the fox talking and lisping throughout like a little child. All
these versions we take to be merely fragments of a much longer story.
In M. Cerquand's "The Chandelier of St. Sauveur," p. 22, the hero's
name is Acherihargaix--"the fox difficult to be caught;" and we
suspect that he, too, was originally merely an animal.
ACHERIA, THE FOX.
One day a fox was hungry. He did not know what to think. He saw a
shepherd pass every day with his flock, and he said to himself that
he ought to steal his milk and his cheese, and to have a good feast;
but he needed some one to help him in order to effect anything. So
he goes off to find a wolf, and he says to him,
"Wolf, wolf! we ought to have a feast with such a shepherd's milk
and cheese. You, you shall go to where the flocks are feeding, and
from a distance you must howl, 'Uhur, uhur, uhur.' The man, after
having milked his sheep, drives them into the field, with his dog,
very early in the morning, and he stops at home to do his work, and
then he makes his cheese; and, when you have begun to howl 'Uhur,
uhur,' and the dog to bark, the shepherd will leave everything else,
and will go off full speed. During this time I will steal the milk,
and we will share it when you come to me."
The wolf agreed to have a feast, and set out. He did just what the
fox had told him. The dog began to bark when the wolf approached. And
when the man heard that he went off, leaving everything, and our fox
goes and steals the vessel in which the curdled milk was. What does
he do then, before the arrival of the wolf? He gently, gently takes
off the cream, thinly, thinly, and he eats all the contents of the
jug. After he has eaten all, he fills it up with dirt, and puts back
the cream on the top, and he awaits the wolf at the place where he
had told him. The fox says to him, since it is he who is to make the
division, that as the top is much better than the underneath part,
the one who should choose that should have only that, and the other
all the rest. "Choose now which you would like."
The wolf says to him,
"I will not have the top; I prefer what is at the bottom."
The fox then takes the top, and gives the poor wolf the vessel full
of dirt. [37] When he saw that, the wolf got angry; but the fox said
to him,
"It is not my fault. Apparently the shepherd makes it like that."
And the fox goes off well filled.
Another day he was again very hungry, and did not know what to
contrive. Every day he saw a boy pass by on the road with his father's
dinner. He says to a blackbird,
"Blackbird, you don't know what we ought to do? We ought to have a
good dinner. A boy will pass by here directly. You will go in front
of him, and when the boy goes to catch you, you will go on a little
farther, limping, and when you shall have done that a little while
the boy will get impatient, and he will put down his basket in order
to catch you quicker. I will take the basket, and will go to such a
spot, and we will share it, and will make a good dinner."
The blackbird says to him, "Yes."
When the boy passes, the blackbird goes in front of the boy, limping,
limping. When the boy stoops (to catch him), the blackbird escapes a
little further on. At last the boy, getting impatient, puts his basket
on the ground, in order to go quicker after the blackbird. The fox,
who kept watching to get hold of the basket, goes off with it, not to
the place agreed upon, but to his hole, and there he stuffs himself,
eating the blackbird's share as well as his own.
Then he says to himself,
"I shall do no good stopping here. The wolf is my enemy, and the
blackbird, too. Something will happen to me if I stay here. I must
go off to the other side of the water."
He goes and stands at the water's edge. A boatman happened to pass,
and he said to him:
"Ho! man, ho! Will you, then, cross me over this water? I will tell
you three truths."
The man said to him, "Yes."
The fox jumps (into the boat), and he begins to say:
"People say that maize bread is as good as wheaten bread. That is a
falsehood. Wheaten bread is better. That is one truth."
When he was in the middle of the river, he said:
"People say, too, 'What a fine night; it is just as clear as the
day!' That's a lie. The day is always clearer. That is the second
truth."
And he told him the third as they were getting near the bank.
"Oh! man, man, you have a bad pair of trousers on, and they will get
much worse, if you do not pass over people who pay you more than I."
"That's very true," said the man; and the fox leapt ashore.
Then I was by the side of the river, and I learnt these three truths,
and I have never forgotten them since.
THE ASS AND THE WOLF.
Astoa Eta Otsoa.
Like many others in the world, there was an ass. He was going along
a ravine, laden with Malaga wine. (You know that asses are very much
afraid of wolves, because the wolves are very fond of the flesh of
asses.) While he was journeying along in that fashion, he sees a wolf
coming at some distance; he could not hide himself anywhere. The wolf
comes up, and the ass says to him:
"Good morning, good morning, Mr. Wolf; in case you should be thirsty,
I have some excellent Malaga to drink."
"I am not thirsty; no!--but astoundingly hungry; yes! My dinner to-day
shall be your head and ears."
"Mr. Wolf, if you were good enough to let me go and hear one mass----?"
He says to him, "Well! yes."
Our ass goes off then. When he gets into the church he shuts the door
inside with his foot, and stops quietly there.
When the wolf began to get impatient at waiting, he said:
"Ay, ay, what a long mass! one would say it was Palm Sunday."
The ass said to him:
"Dirty old wolf, have patience. I am staying here with the angels,
and I have my life (safe) for to-night."
"Ay, ay, you bad ass, you are too, too, filthy, you know. If ever
you meet with me again, mass you shall not hear."
The ass said to him:
"There are no dogs round the fold of Alagaia; if you go there you
would get lots of sheep."
The wolf gives it up, and sets off for the flock where the ass had
told him to go. When the ass saw that he had gone away he came out
of the church, and went home, and took good care not to come near
the wolf's place any more.
IV.--BASA-JAUN, BASA-ANDRE, AND LAMIÑAK.
It is somewhat difficult to get a clear view of what Basa-Jaun and
Basa-Andre, the wild man and the wild woman, really are in Basque
mythology. In the first tale here given Basa-Jaun appears as a kind
of vampire, and his wife, the Basa-Andre, as a sorceress, but we
know of no other such representation of the former. Basa-Jaun is
usually described by Basque writers as a kind of satyr, or faun, a
wood-sprite; and Basques; in speaking of him to us, have frequently
used the French term, "Homme de Bouc," "He-goat-man," to describe
him. In some tales he appears rather as a species of brownie, and
has received the familiar sobriquet of Ancho, [38] from the Spanish
Sancho. In this character he haunts the shepherds' huts in the
mountains, warms himself at their fires, tastes their clotted milk
and cheese, converses with them, and is treated with a familiarity
which, however, is never quite free from a hidden terror. His wife,
the Basa-Andre, appears sometimes as a sorceress, sometimes as a kind
of land-mermaid, as a beautiful lady sitting in a cave and "combing
her locks with a comb of gold," in remote mountain parts. [39]
The Lamiñak are true fairies, and do not differ more from the
general run of Keltic fairies than the Scotch, Irish, Welsh,
and Cornish fairies do from each other. In fact, the legends
are often identical. The Lamiñak were described to us by one who
evidently believed in, and dreaded them, as little people who lived
underground. Another informant stated that they were little people who
came down the chimney. They long to get possession of human beings,
and change and carry off infants unbaptized, but they do not seem
to injure them otherwise. They bring good luck to the houses which
they frequent; they are fond of cleanliness, but always speak and
give their orders in words exactly the opposite of their meaning. In
common with Basa-Jaun and Basa-Andre they hate church bells, [40]
and though not actively hostile to Christianity, are driven away as
it advances. They were formerly great builders of bridges, and even
of churches, [41] but were usually defrauded of their wage, which
was to have been power over some human soul at the completion of
the contract. Fairies' wells and fountains are common in the Landes
and neighbouring Gascon provinces, but we know of none in the Pays
Basque. [42] We failed distinctly to make out what are the "fairies'
holes (Lamiña-ziloak)," spoken of in the Heren-Suge tale (p. 36);
as far as we could gather from the narrator they are simply bare
places in hedges, when covered by the web of the gossamer spider.
We know of no dances by moonlight on fairy rings of green herbage;
but if the reader will carefully eliminate from his memory the rare
fancies of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson about Puck, Oberon, and Titania,
he will find little otherwise to differentiate between the Basque
Lamiñak and the fairies of Sir Walter Scott, of Campbell, and of
Croker's "Irish Legends." One peculiarity certainly is that all the
Basque Lamiñak are sometimes said to be all called "Guïllen," [43]
which appears to be the same as the French Guillaume, and our William.
It must be a sign of a failing belief and interest that witches and
fairies are so often confounded. In these few stories it is evident
that the witch is often a fairy, and the fairy a witch.
BASA-JAUNA, THE WILD MAN.
Once upon a time there lived in one house the landlady and the
farmer's wife. [44] The farmer's wife had three sons; one day they
said to their mother to give each of them a ball and a penny roll,
that they wished to go from country to country. The mother was sorry
to part with her three much-loved sons; but all three started off.
When they were in the midst of a forest they saw that night was
coming on, and the eldest brother said that he would climb up the
first tree. He finds a tall tree, and climbs up to the top, to the
very tip-top, and the second says to him:
"Do you see nothing?"
He says, "No, no; there's nothing to be seen, nothing; not a
feather! nothing!"
"Come down then; you are an old donkey."
And the second climbs, and he sees nothing. The third says to him:
"You are no good at all, you others. I will climb up."
And he climbs to the top, to the very tip-top. The others say to him:
"And do you not see anything?"
He says to them:
"Yes; I see a long column of smoke, but very, very thin, and far,
very far away. Let us go towards that."
And the three brothers set out together. At eight o'clock in the
evening they come to a grand castle, and they knock at the door,
and the Basa-Andre (wild woman) comes to answer. She asks:
"Who is there?"
And they reply, "It is we who are here."
"What do you want, young children? Where are you going to at this
time of night?"
"We ask and beg of you to give us shelter for to-night; we will be
satisfied with a corner of the floor, poor wretches as we are."
"I have my husband, the Basa-Jaun, and if he catches you he will eat
you; that's certain."
"And if he catches us outside he will eat us all the same."
Then she let these three brothers come in, and she hides the three in
three different corners. Afterwards, at nine o'clock, the Basa-Jaun
comes. He made a great noise and blustering, and then the Basa-Andre
goes out, and says to him:
"There is nobody here."
"Yes, you have somebody; bring them out, or else I will eat you
myself."
And she goes and brings out the eldest brother, trembling with
fright. The Basa-Jaun says to him,
"Will you be my servant?"
He says to him, "Yes."
And Basa-Jaun begins again to sniff about.
"You have still somebody else here?"
And she brings out the second, and he says to him:
"Will you be servant to me?"
And he said, "Yes."
Again, he smelled the smell of some one, and at the third time she
brings out the third, and he says to him:
"All three of you shall sup with me to-night, and afterwards we shall
go to bed. But to-morrow we will all go hunting."
And they go hunting the next day until eight o'clock in the evening.
Now, they had at home a little sister. She was little then, but in
time she grew up. One day the landlady and the farmer's wife had
put out the new maize in the garden to dry; and when no one saw her,
the little girl took some from her mistress' heap, and put it to her
own. When the mistress saw that, she began to cry out, saying to her,
"Bold hussey that you are, there is no one like you! You will come
to a bad end like your brothers."
And the young girl began to cry, and goes to find her mother, and
says to her,
"Mother, had I any brothers?" [45]
She says to her, "Yes, my child."
"What were they?"
"Child, they went away a long time ago," she said to her.
This little girl says,
"I, too, must be off to-day. Give me a distaff to spin with, and a
penny cake."
She sets off, and comes to the house of the Basa-Jaun, and she knocks
at the door, and she lets her in. While his wife was telling her that
it is the house of the Basa-Jaun, the elder brother comes in; but they
did not recognise one another at all. And afterwards Basa-Jaun comes,
and says, as he enters the house:
"You have something here for me," says he.
"No," says she.
"Show it."
And immediately she shows her. Basa-Jaun says to her:
"Will you engage yourself as my servant?"
She says to him, "Yes, sir."
Some days afterwards the brothers recognised their sister, and they
embraced each other very much. And this young girl who was so well
before began to grow thin. And one day one of her brothers asked her:
"What is the matter with you that you are getting thin like this?"
And she answered:
"The master every evening asks me to put my little finger through the
door, and he sucks the finger through the door, and I become every
day more sad and more languid." [46]
One day, when the Basa-Andre was not at home, these brothers and the
sister plotted together to kill Basa-Jaun, if they could catch him
in a ravine in a certain place. And they kill him.
One day the wife asks,
"Where is Basa-Jaun?"
And Basa-Andre takes out three large teeth, and brings them to the
house, and tells this young girl herself, when she heats the water for
her brothers' feet in the evening, to put one tooth in the water of
each. [47] And as soon as the third had finished washing the three
brothers became oxen; and this young girl used to drive all three
into the fields. And this young girl lived there on the birds they
(the oxen) found, and nothing else.
One day, as she was passing over a bridge, [48] she sees Basa-Andre
under, and says to her:
"If you do not make these three oxen men as they were before, I will
put you into a red-hot oven."
She answers her:
"No! go to such a dell, and take thence three hazel sticks, [49]
and strike each of them three blows on the back."
And she did what she told her, and they were changed into men the
same as they were before; and all the brothers and the sister lived
happily together in Basa-Jaun's castle, and as they lived well they
made a good end also.
Estefanella Hirigaray.
THE SERVANT AT THE FAIRY'S.
Once upon a time there was a woman who had three daughters. One day
the youngest said to her that she must go out to service. And going
from town to town, she met at last a fairy who asked her:
"Where are you going to, my child?"
And she answered, "Do you know a place for a servant?"
"Yes; if you will come to my house I will take you."
She said, "Yes."
She gave her her morning's work to do, and said to her:
"We are fairies. I must go from home, but your work is in the kitchen;
smash the pitcher, break all the plates, pound the children, give
them breakfast (by themselves), dirty their faces, and rumple their
hair." [50]
While she was at breakfast with the children, a little dog comes to
her and says:
"Tchau, tchau, tchow; I too, I want something."
"Be off from here, silly little dog; I will give you a kick."
But the dog did not go away; and at last she gave him something to
eat--a little, not much.
"And now," says he, "I will tell you what the mistress has told
you to do. She told you to sweep the kitchen, to fill the pitcher,
and to wash all the plates, and that if it is all well done she will
give you the choice of a sack of charcoal or of a bag of gold; of a
beautiful star on your forehead, or of a donkey's tail hanging from
it. You must answer, 'A sack of charcoal and a donkey's tail.'"
The mistress comes. The new servant had done all the work, and she
was very well satisfied with her. So she said to her:
"Choose which you would like, a sack of charcoal or a bag of gold?"
"A sack of charcoal is the same to me."
"A star for your forehead, or a donkey's tail?"
"A donkey's tail would be the same to me."
Then she gives her a bag of gold, and a beautiful star on her
forehead. [51] Then the servant goes home. She was so pretty with
this star, and this bag of gold on her shoulders, the whole family
was astonished at her. The eldest daughter says to her mother:
"Mother, I will go and be a servant too."
And she says to her, "No, my child, you shall not do so."
But as she would not leave her in peace (she assented), and she
goes off like her sister. She comes into the city of the fairies,
and meets the same fairy as her sister did. She says to her:
"Where are you going, my girl?"
"To be a servant."
"Come to us."
And she takes her as servant. She tells her like the first one:
"You will dig up the kitchen, break the plates, smash the pitcher, give
the children their breakfasts by themselves, and dirty their faces."
There was some of the breakfast left over, and the little dog comes
in, and he went:
"Tchow! tchow! tchow! I too, I should like something."
And he follows her everywhere, and she gives him nothing; and at last
she drove him off with kicks. The mistress comes home, and she finds
the kitchen all dug up, the pitcher and all the plates broken. And
she asks the servant:
"What do you ask for wages? A bag of gold or a sack of charcoal? a
star on your forehead, or a donkey's tail there?"
She chose the bag of gold and a star on her forehead; but she gave
her a sack of charcoal, and a donkey's tail for her forehead. She goes
away crying, and tells her mother that she comes back very sorry. And
the second daughter also asks permission to go.
"No! no!" (says the mother), and she stops at home.
Estefanella Hirigaray.
THE FAIRY IN THE HOUSE.
There was once upon a time a gentleman and lady. And the lady was
spinning one evening. There came to her a fairy, and they could not
get rid of her; and they gave her every evening some ham to eat,
and at last they got very tired of their fairy.
One day the lady said to her husband:
"I cannot bear this fairy; I wish I could drive her away."
And the husband plots to dress himself up in his wife's clothes just as
if it was she, and he does so. The wife goes to bed, and the husband
remains in the kitchen alone, and the fairy comes as usual. And the
husband was spinning. The fairy says to him:
"Good-day, madam."
"The same to you too; sit down."
"Before you made chirin, chirin, but now you make firgilun,
fargalun." [52]
The man replies, "Yes, now I am tired."
As his wife used to give her ham to eat, the man offers her some also.
"Will you take your supper now?"
"Yes, if you please," replies the fairy.
He puts the frying-pan on the fire with a bit of ham. While that was
cooking, and when it was red, red-hot, he throws it right into the
fairy's face. The poor fairy begins to cry out, and then come thirty
of her friends.
"Who has done any harm to you?"
"I, to myself; I have hurt myself." [53]
"If you have done it yourself, cure it yourself."
And all the fairies go off, and since then there came no more fairies
to that house. This gentleman and lady were formerly so well off,
but since the fairy comes no longer the house little by little goes
to ruin, and their life was spent in wretchedness. If they had lived
well they would have died well too.
Estefanella Hirigaray.
THE PRETTY BUT IDLE GIRL. [54]
Once upon a time there was a mother who had a very beautiful
daughter. The mother was always bustling about, but the daughter
would not do anything. So she gave her such a good beating that she
sat down on a flat stone to cry. One day the young owner of the castle
went by. He asks:
"What makes such a pretty girl cry like that?"
The woman answers him:
"As she is too pretty she will not work."
The young man asks if she knows how to sew.
She answers, "Yes; if she liked she could make seven shirts a day."
This young gentleman is much smitten with her. He goes home, and
brings a piece of linen, and says to her:
"Here are seven shirts, and if you finish them by such a time we will
marry together."
She sat thinking without doing anything, and with tears in her
eyes. Then comes to her an old woman, who was a witch, and says to her:
"What is it makes you so sad?"
She answers, "Such a gentleman has brought me seven shirts to sew,
but I cannot do them. I am sitting here thinking."
This old woman says to her:
"You know how to sew?"
"I know how to thread the needle; (that is all)."
This woman says to her:
"I will make your shirts for you when you want them, if you remember
my name in a year and a day." And she adds, "If you do not remember
I shall do with you whatever I like. Marie Kirikitoun--nobody can
remember my name."
And she agreed. She makes her the seven shirts for the appointed
time. When the young man came the shirts were made, and he takes the
young girl with joy and they are both married.
But this young girl grew continually sadder and sadder; though her
husband made great feasts for her she never laughed. One day they had
a frightfully grand festival. There came to the door an old woman,
and she asks the servant:
"What is the reason that you have such grand feastings?"
She answers, "Our lady never laughs at all, and her husband has these
grand feasts to make her gay."
The old woman replied:
"If she saw what I have heard this day she would laugh most certainly."
The servant said to her, "Stay here; I will tell her so at once."
They call the old woman in, and she told them that she had seen an
old woman leaping and bounding from one ditch to another, and saying
all the time:
"Houpa, houpa, Marie Kirikitoun; nobody will remember my name."
When this young lady heard that, she was merry at once, and writes down
this name at once. She recompensed highly the old woman, and she was
very happy; and when the other old woman came she knew her name. [55]
Estefanella Hirigaray.
THE DEVIL'S AGE.
There was a gentleman and lady who were very poor. This man used to
sit sadly at a cross-roads. There came to him a gentleman, who asked:
"Why are you so sad?"
"Because I have not wherewith to live."
He said to him, "I will give you as much money as you like, if at
such a time you tell the age of the devil."
Our man goes off happy. He leads a merry life with his wife, for they
wanted for nothing. They lived at a great rate. But time went on,
and the time was approaching. This man recollected that he had not
busied himself at all about the devil's age. He became pensive. His
wife asked him what was the matter with him then? why is he not
happy? that they wanted for nothing; why is he so sad? He tells
her how it is that he got rich, and what compact he had made with a
gentleman. His wife said to him:
"If you have nothing but that, it is nothing at all. Get into a
barrel of honey, and when you come out of it get into another barrel
of feathers, and dressed like that go to the cross-roads and wait for
the devil there. You will put yourself on all fours, and walk backwards
and forwards, and go between his legs, and walk all round him."
The man does as his wife had told him. The devil comes, and draws back
(when he sees him); and our man goes up quite close to the devil. The
devil being frightened said to him:
"I am so many years old, and I have never seen any animal like that,
and such a frightful one." [56]
Our man had heard enough. He went off home at full speed, and told
his wife that they would want for nothing, that he had done as she
had told him, just as if she had been a witch, and that he was no
longer afraid of the devil. They lived rich and happily, and if they
lived well, they died well too.
Franchun Beltzarri.
THE FAIRY-QUEEN GODMOTHER. [57]
There were, like many others in the world, a man and a woman
over-burthened with children, and very poor. The woman no more knew
what to do. She said that she would go and beg. She goes off, far,
far, far away, and she arrives at the city of the fairies. After she
had told them how many children she had, all give her a great many
alms--she was laden with them.
The queen of the fairies gives her besides twenty pounds in gold,
and says to her:
"If you will give me your child when you are confined--you shall
bring it up in your law--I will give you a great deal of money,
if you will do that."
She told her that the godmother was already decided upon, but that she
would speak about it to her husband. The queen told her to go home,
and to return with the answer in a week.
She gets home as she best can, very much fatigued by her burthen. Her
husband was astonished that she could have carried so much. She tells
him what had happened with the queen of the fairies. He says to her:
"Certainly, we will make her godmother."
And she returns at the end of a week to tell the queen that she accepts
her. She tells her not to send and tell her when she is confined,
that she will know it herself, and that she will come all right. At
the end of a week she is confined of a daughter. The queen arrives,
as she had said, with a mule laden with gold. When they came back
from the christening, the godmother and the child fly away; and the
parents console themselves with their other children, thinking that
she will be happier in the house of the queen of the fairies.
The queen takes her to a corner of a mountain. It is there where her
house was. She had already another god-daughter; this was a little
dog, whose name was Rose, [58] and she named this last god-daughter
Pretty-Rose. She gave her, too, a glint of diamonds in the middle of
her forehead. [59] She was very pretty. She grew up in the corner of
the mountain, amusing herself with this dog. She said to her one day:
"Has the queen no other houses? I am tired of being always here."
The dog said to her: "Yes, she has a very fine one by the side of
the king's highway, and I will speak to my godmamma about it."
And the dog then told her how Pretty-Rose was bored, and (asked
her) if she would not change her house. She said to her, "Yes,"
and off they go. While they were there one day Pretty-Rose was on
the balcony, and a king's son passes, and he was astonished at the
beauty of Pretty-Rose; and the king begged and prayed her to look at
him again, and (asked her) if she would not go with him. She told him,
"No, that she must tell it to her godmamma." Then the dog said, aside:
"No, without me she shall not go anywhere."
This king says to her: "But I will take you, too, willingly; but how
shall I get you?"
Rose says to him: "As I give every evening to my godmother always
a glass of good liqueur to make her sleep well, as if by mistake,
instead of half a glass, I will give her the glass full, and as she
will not be able to rise any more to shut the door as usual, I, I will
go and take the key to shut it. I will pretend to, and will give her
back the key, leaving the door open, and you will open it when you
come. She will not hear anything; she will be in a deep sleep."
The king's son said that he would come at midnight, in his flying
chariot.
When night came, Rose gave her godmother the good drink in a glass,
brim, brim-full. The godmother said:
"What! what! child!"
"You will sleep all the better, godmamma."
"You are right," and she drinks it all.
But she could not any more get up to shut the door, she had become
so sleepy.
Rose said to her: "Godmamma! I will shut the door to-day; stop where
you are."
She gave her the key, and Rose turns and turns it back again and again
in the keyhole as if she had locked it; and leaving it unlocked she
gave the key to her godmother, and she puts it in her pocket. She
goes to bed; but Rose and Pretty-Rose did not go to bed at all. At
midnight the son of the king arrives with his flying chariot. Rose
and Pretty-Rose get into it, and go to this young man's house. The
next day Rose says to Pretty-Rose:
"You are not so pretty as you were yesterday;" and looking at her
closely, "I find you very ugly to-day."
Pretty-Rose said to her: "My godmamma must have taken away my diamond
glint."
And she said to Rose, "You must go to my godmamma, and ask her to
give me back the glint that I had before."
Rose did not want to go there--she was afraid; but Pretty-Rose prayed
her so much, that she took off the silver dress and set out. [60]
When she came to the mountain, she began to call out:
"Godmamma! godmamma! Give Pretty-Rose her beautiful glint as before. I
shall be angry with you for always (if you do not), and you will see
what will happen to you."
The godmother said to her:
"Come here, come in, I will give you breakfast."
She said, "I am afraid you will beat me."
"No! no! come quickly, then."
"You will give Pretty-Rose her glint?"
"Yes, yes, she has it already."
She then goes in. The queen washes her feet and wipes them, and puts
her upon the velvet cushion, and gives her some chocolate; and says to
her, that she knows where Pretty-Rose is, and that she will be married,
and to tell her from her not to trouble herself about her toilet,
nor about anything that is necessary for the wedding and feast,
that she would come on the morning of the day.
Rose goes off then. While she is going through the city where
Pretty-Rose is, she hears two ladies, who were saying to two gentlemen,
"What kind of wife is it that our brother is going to take? Not like
us, because he keeps her shut up so close. Let us go and see her."
The little dog said to them, "Not a bit like you, you horrible
blubber-lips, as you are. You shall see her--yes."
When the young kings heard that, they were ready to run their swords
through the poor little dog. When she gets to Pretty-Rose's house
she hides herself, and tells her all that has happened. Pretty-Rose
gives her some good liqueur to drink, and she comes to herself. The
king makes a proclamation that whoever shall (merely) spit where the
little dog shall have placed her feet shall be killed, and to mind
and pay attention to it.
When the marriage day had arrived, came the queen. She brought for
the wedding-day a robe of diamonds; for the next day, of gold; and for
the third day, of silver. Judge how beautiful she was with her glint
of diamonds, and her dress of diamonds, too. They could not look at
her. Her godmother told her to have her sisters-in-law there, and not
to be afraid of them; that they could not come near her in beauty. When
she went out (of her room) on the wedding-day, her sisters-in-law could
not look at her, she dazzled them so much. They said to each other:
"The little dog was right when she said she was beautiful, this lady."
And for three days Pretty-Rose walked about, [61] and every one was
astounded at her beauty. When the feast was over, the godmother
went home. Rose would not leave Pretty-Rose. The godmother told
Pretty-Rose that she was born of poor parents, and that she had
once helped them, but that what she had given them must be already
exhausted. Pretty-Rose gave them enough for all to live grandly. She
herself had four children, two boys and two girls; and if they had
lived well, they had died well.
Laurentine
Learnt it from her mother.
V.--WITCHCRAFT AND SORCERY.
Our legends of witchcraft and sorcery are very poor, and in some of
these, as said above, the witch is evidently a fairy. The reason of
this is not that the belief in witchcraft is extinct among the Basques,
but because it is so rife. Of stories of witchcraft (as matters of
fact), and some of them very sad ones, we have heard plenty; but
of legends, very few. In fact, witchcraft among the Basques has not
yet arrived at the legendary stage. The difference is felt at once
in taking down their recitations. In the legends they are reciting a
text learnt by heart. It is "the story says so." "It is so," whether
they understand it or not. But they tell their stories of witchcraft
in their own words, just as they would narrate any other facts which
they supposed had happened to themselves or to their neighbours. One
woman told us, as a fact within her own knowledge, and persisted in it,
a tale which appears both in M. Cerquand's pages and in Fr. Michel's
"Pays Basque." [62] It was only after cross-examination that we could
discover that it had not really happened to her own daughter, but
that she had only seen the cottage and the chapel which are the scene
of the alleged occurrence. We have, too, been informed on undoubted
authority that, only a year or two back, a country priest was sorely
puzzled by one of his parishioners, in his full senses, seriously
and with contrition confessing to him that he frequented the "Sabbat."
But what is strange and unexpected is, that with this prevalence of
belief in witchcraft and sorcery, and which can be traced back to our
earliest notices of the Basques, there is nothing to differentiate
their belief on this subject from the current European belief
of three centuries back. All the Basque words for witchcraft and
sorcery are evidently borrowed. The only purely Basque term is Asti,
which seems to be rather a diviner than a sorcerer. The term for the
"Sabbat" is "Akhelarre"--"goat pasture"--and seems to be taken from the
apparition of the devil there in form of a goat, which is not uncommon
elsewhere. Pierre de Lancre, by the terrors of his hideous inquisition
in 1609, produced a moral epidemic, and burnt numerous victims at
St. Jean de Luz; but there is not a single Basque term in all his
pages. Contrary to general opinion, both the Spanish Inquisition and
the French ecclesiastical tribunals were more merciful and rational,
and showed far less bigotry and barbarity than the two doctrinaire
lawyers and judges of Bordeaux. The last person burnt for witchcraft
at St. Jean de Luz was a Portuguese lady, who was accused of having
secreted the Host for purposes of magic, in 1619. While her case was
being investigated before the Bishop of Bayonne, in the crypt of the
church, a mob of terrified fishermen, on the eve of starting for
Newfoundland, burst in, tore her out of the church, and burnt her
off-hand, in the midst of the "Place." "They dared not," they said,
"sail while such a crime was unpunished." The Bishop's procés-verbal
of the occurrence is still extant in the archives of the Mairie.
The magic wand in all our tales is now said to be made from the
hazel. In De Lancre's time it was from the "Souhandourra"--"the cornus
sanguinea"--or dog-wood. This was then the witches' tree.
THE WITCHES AT THE SABBAT. [63]
Once upon a time, like many others in the world, there was a young
lad. He was one day in a lime-kiln, and the witches came at night. They
used to dance there, and one pretended to be the mistress of a house,
who was very ill; and one day, as she was going out of the church,
she let the holy wafer fall on the ground, and a toad had picked
it up; and this toad is still near the door, under a stone, with
the bread in his mouth. [64] And again, this same witch said that,
until they took away this bread out of the toad's mouth, this lady
will not be cured. This young lad had heard it all. When they had
danced their rounds, the witches go away home, and our lad comes
out of the lime-kiln, and goes to the house of this lady who is ill,
and says to her,
"I know what must be done to cure you," and he told her all that he
had heard from the witch.
The sick lady did what they told her, and the same day she was cured,
and the young man was well paid.
And that very evening there came to him a hunch-backed girl, and said
to him,
"I have heard that you know where the witches hold their Sabbat."
He says, "Yes."
"To-morrow I think I should like to hear what the witches say."
And he points out to her the hole of the lime-kiln. And at midnight
all the witches came, some from one quarter, some from another--some
laughing, and others cutting capers. The witches said one to another,
"We must look in the lime-kiln, to see what may be there."
They go to look, and they find the hunchback girl, and they send
her off--
"Go, go--through hedges and hedges, through thorns and thorns,
through furze-bushes and furze-bushes, scratches and pricks."
And in no way could our poor hunchback find her way home. All torn
to pieces and exhausted, at last, in the morning, she arrived at
her house.
Estefanella Hirigaray.
The second part of this story is evidently a blundered version,
transferred from fairies to witches, of Croker's "Legend of
Knochgrafton" ("Fairy Legends of South of Ireland," p. 10); and
M. Cerquand, Part II., p. 17, has a Basque version, "Les Deux Bossus,"
almost identical with this Irish legend. The tale, as given in Croker,
is found in the Bearnais Gascon, in Spanish, Italian, and German. It
is evident, we think, that the Basque land is not its home, but that
it has travelled there. We have also another Basque variation of
the first part, in which two lads hear the witches at the Sabbat say
that a king's daughter can only be cured by eating an ox's heart. The
opening of this story is so different, that we here give it:--
THE WITCHES AND THE IDIOTS.
Once upon a time there were two brothers, the one an idiot, and the
other a fool. They had an old mother, old, old, very old. One morning
early the elder arranges to go with his sheep to the mountain, and
he leaves the fool at home with his old, old, mother, and said to him:
"I will give my mother some chocolate now, and you will give her a
hot bath (afterwards), quite, quite, hot."
He goes to the mountain with his sheep. The second son put the water
on to boil, and said to his mother:
"My mother, the water is hot, what bath would you like?" [65]
She says to him:
"A bath with wood-ashes."
And he carries it to the bed while it is boiling; and as she did not
get up, he said to her:
"Would you like a little broth?" And she said "Yes."
"My mother, get up quickly!" and she did not get up.
He takes her, and puts her himself into this boiling water, so that
he boiled his poor mother. And he said to her,
"My mother, get up again; the water is not cold."
She did not answer. The night comes, and the other brother returns
from the mountains, and says to him:
"How is our mother?"
"All right."
"Have you given her the bath?"
"Yes; but she is still there, and she is asleep in her bath."
"Go and see if she is still asleep."
He goes, and says, "No, no; she is laughing--she keeps on laughing."
The other brother goes there, and perceives that their mother is
quite dead. He did not know what to do. They both go into the garden,
and there they make a great hole and bury her.
They then burn the house, go into the woods, see the witches, cure the
king's daughter, whom one of them marries, and they live happily. [66]
It is possible that this first part may be a narrative of fact. We knew
at Asté, near Bagnères de Bigorre, a brother, an idiot "crétin," who
deliberately began to chop up his sister (also an idiot and "crétin"),
who offered no resistance. He had chopped off several of her fingers,
when they were accidently interrupted. In spite of the blood and pain,
she was only laughing at it.
We have another tale of this kind, which may be also founded on fact,
so sad is often the condition of the crétins in the mountains. It is
of a mother and her imbecile son; he nearly kills himself by chopping
off the branch of the tree on which he was sitting. Then he believes
himself dead, and commits various other follies. His mother thinks a
wife might be able to take care of him, and tells him to cast sheeps'
eyes at the young girls coming out of church after mass. He takes
this literally, cuts out the eyes of all their flock, and so kills
their sheep, the only thing they had, and throws these at the girls,
who are disgusted, and quarrel with him. He goes home, and mother
and son end their lives together in wretchedness.
THE WITCH AND THE NEW-BORN INFANT.
Like many others in the world, there was a man and woman, labourers,
who lived by their toil. They were at ease. They had a mule, and the
man lived by his mule carrying wine. Sometimes he was a week away from
home. He always went to the same inn, where there was a woman and her
daughter. One day the labourer sets off with his loaded mule, and his
wife was very near her confinement. She was expecting it hourly; but,
as he had orders upon orders, he was obliged to set off. He goes then,
and comes to this inn. It was a market-day, and they had not kept a
bedroom for him as usual, because there were so many people there,
and he is put into a dark room without windows near the kitchen. He
had not yet gone to sleep, when he hears the woman say to her daughter,
"You are not aware that the wife of the man who is there is
confined? Go and see if he is asleep."
When the man heard that, he began to snore; and when the young girl
heard through a slit in the door that he was snoring, she said to
her mother,
"Yes, yes, he is asleep."
The mother said to her then (you may guess whether he was listening)--
"I must go and charm this newly-born infant."
She takes up a stone under the hearth, and takes from under it a
saucepan, in which there was an ointment. She takes a brush, and well
rubs herself over her whole body, saying, [67]
"Under all the clouds and over all the hedges, half an hour on the
road, another half-hour there, and another to return."
As soon as she had said that, off she went. When the man saw that
she was gone, he comes out of his room. He had seen what she did. He
anoints himself like her, and says,
"Over the clouds, and under the hedges"--(he made a blunder there
[68])--"a quarter of an hour to go there, half an hour to stop,
and a quarter of an hour for the return."
He arrives at his house, but torn to pieces by the thorns, and
his clothes in strips, but that was all the same to him; he places
himself behind the door of his wife's bedroom with a big stick. There
comes a great white cat, "Miau, miau!" [69] When the man heard that,
he goes out of the place where he was hiding, and with his stick he
almost killed this cat, and set out directly afterwards for the inn,
but not easily, under all the hedges. In spite of that, he arrives at
the woman's house. He goes to bed quickly. The next day, when he gets
up, he sees only the daughter. He asks her where her mother is. "She
is ill, and you must pay me."
"No! I prefer to see your mother."
He goes to the mother, and finds her very ill. From this day he goes
no more to that inn. When he gets home, he tells his wife what had
happened, and how he had saved the child. But all was not ended
there. They had misfortune upon misfortune. All their cows died,
and all their other animals too. They were sinking into the deepest
misery. [70] They did not know what would become of them. This man
was brooding sadly in thought, when he met an old woman, who asked him
what was the matter with him. He told her all his troubles, how many
misfortunes they had had--all his cows lost. He had bought others,
and they too had died directly. He is charmed by witches.
"If you are like that you have only to put a consecrated taper under
the peck measure in the stable, and you will catch her."
He does as the old woman told him, and hides himself in the manger. At
midnight she comes under the form of a cat, and gets astride the
ox, saying:
"The others before were fine, but this is very much finer."
When our man heard that he comes out from where he was hiding, and
with his stick he leaves her quite dead; although when he had done
that our man was without any resources; (he had) neither bread,
nor maize, nor cows, nor pigs, and his wife and children were starving.
He goes off to see if he can do anything. There meets him a gentleman,
who says to him:
"What is the matter, man, that you are so sad?"
"It is this misery that I am in that torments me so."
"If you have only that, we will arrange all that if you like. I will
give you as much money as you wish, if at the end of the year you
can guess, and if you tell me with what the devil makes his chalice;
and if you do not guess it then your soul shall be for us."
When our man has got his money, he goes off home without thinking at
all of the future. He lived happily for some time with his wife and
child; but as the time approached he grew sad, and said nothing to his
wife. One day he had gone a long way, wishing and trying to find out
his secret, and the night overtakes him. He stops at a cross-roads, and
hides himself. (You know that the witches come to the cross-roads [71]
to meet together.) They come then, "hushta" from one side, "fushta"
from the other, dancing. When they had well amused themselves like
that, they begin to tell each other the news. One says:
"You do not know, then, such a man has sold his head to the devil;
certainly he will not guess with what the devil makes his chalice. I
do not know myself; tell it me."
"With the parings of the finger-nails which Christians cut on the
Sunday."
Our man with difficulty, with great difficulty, kept from showing
himself, through his joy and delight. As soon as the day appeared
all the witches went off to their homes, and our man too went off to
his. He was no more sad. He waited till the day arrived, and went to
the cross-roads. This gentleman was already there, come with a lot
of devils, thinking that he would be for hell. He asks him:
"You know what the devil makes his chalice of?"
"I do not know, but I will try. With the parings of the finger-nails
which Christians cut on Sundays?"
As soon as he heard that, the devil goes off with all the others
in fire and flame to the bottom of hell. Our man went off home, and
lived a long time with his wife and daughter. If they had lived well,
they would have died well too.
THE CHANGELING.
Like many others in the world, there was a gentleman and lady. They
were very well off, but they could not keep any of their children. They
had had ever so many, and all died. The lady was again in a hopeful
condition. At the beginning of the night she was confined of a
fine boy.
Two young men heard this news, and they said to each other:
"We ought to have a feast; we must steal a sheep out of this
house. They will not pay attention to us with all their bustle and
their joy."
One of the lads then goes after eleven o'clock towards the house. He
meets an old woman, who said to him:
"Where are you off to, lad? There is nothing like the truth."
"I was going, then, to such a house; the lady has been confined,
and I wish to take advantage of it to steal a sheep. They will not
pay any attention to-day. And you, where are you going?"
"I too am going to the house. I am a witch, and it is I who have
killed all their children."
"And how do you do that?"
"Easily. When the infant sneezes nobody says, 'Domine stekan,' [72]
and then I become mistress of the child."
The witch enters, doubtless as she liked, much more easily than our
lad; but nevertheless he got in himself too. He was busy choosing
his sheep, when he hears the infant sneeze. He says very, very loudly:
"Domine stekan; even if I should not get my sheep."
They go to see who is there, and what he was saying. The lad relates
what the old woman had told him. As you may imagine they thanked him
well, and told him to choose the finest sheep. The father and mother
were delighted that they would save this child; but, poor wretches,
they had not seen everything. A devil had come, who took their child
and carried it to the roadside, and left it there. A coachman passing
by sees this child, and takes it with him. He was married, but had
no children. They had a great desire to have one. They were very
well off also. His wife was delighted to see this fine child; they
gave it a good nurse, and the child grew fast and became wonderfully
handsome. The devil had placed himself in the child's cradle. This
mother gave him suck, and, contrary to the other, he did not grow at
all. The parents were vexed at having such a child; they did not know
what to think of it. Their true child was more than extraordinarily
clever. The coachman and his wife were dazed with joy, and they loved
him as (if he were) their own child. When he was twelve years old,
he said to his father and mother that he wished to become a monk. The
coachman and his wife were very sorry, and they asked him to become
only a priest. But after having seen his great desire they allow him
to do as he wished.
He went away then, and at the age of eighteen years he was able to
say mass. When he was there, one day two men were passing in front
of the garden of his real father, and they began to quarrel. They got
so enraged that one killed the other, and threw him into his father's
garden. This father was tried and condemned to death for having killed
this man.
While this young monk was saying mass, there comes to him a white
pigeon and tells him what was taking place in his father's house,
and that the pigeon will assume the form of the monk, "and you shall
go off in my shape." The monk willingly does what he tells him, and
arrives when they are leading his father to execution. He was being
followed by the judges and by a crowd of people. He asks what he has
done. They tell him that he has killed a man. He asks if they would
do him a favour before they put him to death--if they would accompany
him to the grave of the man whom he has killed. They tell him, "Yes."
They all go off then. The monk has the grave opened, restores him to
life, and asks him, pointing to his father:
"Is this the man who has killed you?"
The dead man says to him, "No!"
After having said that he dies again. The monk did not wish to know
who had killed him; he knew all he wanted with that. The father wished
to take the monk home with him to dinner, but he would not go that
day. He said to him:
"I will come on such a day."
As you may fancy they made a splendid dinner; nothing was wanting
there. They invited all their friends and acquaintances to rejoice with
them. When the monk arrives, the lady, before sitting down to table,
wished to show him her child, how she had suckled him with her own
milk eighteen years, and that he did not grow at all, but was always
just as he was when he was born. The monk betook himself to prayer,
and he saw that which they believed to be a child fly away under the
shape of a devil in fire and flame, and he carried off with him part
of the house. He told his mother not to vex herself because she had had
the devil there, and that she would be happier without such a child.
All the world was astonished at the power of this monk; but the mother
was still grieved. The monk, to console her, told her his history;
how he was her true child; how the devil had taken him and carried him
to the roadside; how he had been found and brought up by a coachman;
and that it was he himself who had been made priest, and her son. All
were astounded at his words. After they had well dined, the monk went
back into his convent, and the father and mother lived honourably,
as they did before; and as they lived well, they died well too.
Catherine Elizondo.
VI.--CONTES DES FÉES.
Under this head, we include all those legends which do not readily fall
under our other denominations. Fée and fairy are not synonymous. All
such tales as those of the "Arabian Nights" might come within the
designation of Contes des Fées, but they could hardly be included under
Fairy Tales, though the former may be said to embrace the latter. We
have divided our legends of this kind into two sections:--(A)
Those which have a greater or less similarity to Keltic legends, as
recorded in Campbell's "Tales of the West Highlands," and elsewhere;
(B) Those which we believe to be derived directly from the French.
We have chosen the designation Keltic, because the burning question
concerning the Basques at present is their relation to the Keltic
race. Anything that can throw light upon this will have a certain
interest for a small portion of the scientific world. That these
legends do in some degree resemble the Keltic ones will, we think,
be denied by no one. Whether they have a closer affinity with them
than with the general run of Indo-European mythology may be an open
question. Or, again, whether the Basques have borrowed from the Kelts,
or the Kelts from the Basques, we leave undetermined. One legend here
given, that of "Juan Dekos," has clearly been borrowed from the Gaelic,
and that since the Keltic occupation of the Hebrides. [73] The very
term Keltiberi, as used by the classical writers, shows some contact
of the Kelts with the Basques in ancient times, whether we take Basque
and Iberi to be co-extensive and convertible terms or not. What the
rôle of the "White Mare" is in these tales we do not understand. Can
it be connected with the figure of a horse which appears so frequently
on the so-called Keltiberian coins, or is it a mere variation of the
Sanscrit "Harits, or horses of the sun?" Campbell, Vol. I., p. 63,
says these "were always feminine, as the horses in Gaelic stories are."
It may be, perhaps, as well to mention that we did not see Campbell's
"Tales of the West Highlands" till after these legends had been
written down.
(A.)--TALES LIKE THE KELTIC.
MALBROUK. [74]
Like many others in the world, there was a man and a woman who were
over-burdened with children, and were very poor. The man used to
go to the forest every day to get wood for his family. His wife was
on the point of being confined. One day he was in the forest, and a
gentleman comes to him, and says:
"What are you doing, friend?"
"I am looking for wood to support my family."
"You are very poor, then?"
"Yes, yes."
"If you will make me godfather to your next child according to your
law, I will give you a great deal of money."
He says to him, "Yes, I will do so."
He gives him, then, a great deal of money, and he goes home. His wife
is confined shortly afterwards, and they were waiting, not knowing
what to do to tell it to the godfather, since they did not know where
he lived. He himself appeared from somewhere. They go to the church,
and he gives him the name Malbrouk. While they were returning to the
house, the godfather disappears with the child like smoke. The father
and mother were distressed about it, though they had plenty of money;
but in time their grief faded away.
The old Malbrouk went to his house. His wife was a witch, and they had
three daughters. The little Malbrouk grew fast, and at seven years'
old he was as tall as a tall man. His godfather said to him:
"Malbrouk, would you like to go to your own home?"
He said to him, "Am I not here in my own home?"
He told him, "No," and that he might go there for three days.
"Go to such a mountain, and the first house that you will see there
will be yours."
He goes, then, to the mountain, and sees the house, and goes to it. He
finds his two brothers at the door cutting wood. He tells them that
he is their brother; but they will not believe him. They take him
indoors, and he tells his father and mother that he is Malbrouk. They
are astonished to see such a big man for seven years' old. They pass
these three days in great delight; and he said to his brothers:
"There is plenty of room at my godfather's for you too, and you must
come with me."
They go off, then, all three together. When they arrive, the witch
was not at all contented. She said to her husband:
"I don't know. These three men will do us some mischief, and we must
kill them."
Malbrouk did not wish to; but as the witch gave him no rest, he told
her that at the end of three days he would kill them. What does the
little Malbrouk do? At night their daughters used to put crowns
on their heads, and the little Malbrouk and his brothers cotton
night-caps. The little Malbrouk says to them:
"We must make an exchange; it is now our turn to have the crowns."
The girls were just as well pleased, and they gave them to them. One
night (old) Malbrouk goes there, and after having felt their
heads, when he perceived that they had the night-caps, he kills
the three. After the little Malbrouk saw that he woke his brothers,
took his godfather's seven-leagued boots, and goes off, far, far,
far away. The witch said to (the old Malbrouk):
"You have taken good care whom you have killed? I am not at all
satisfied that you have not done some donkey-trick."
The witch goes, and sees her three daughters dead. She was terribly
angry, [75] and there was no help for it.
Malbrouk and his brothers come to a place where a king lives, and
he remarks that everything is sad. He asks what it is? They tell him
that the king has lost his three daughters, and that nobody can find
them. Malbrouk says to them:
"I will find them."
They tell that quickly to the king, and bring them before him,
and Malbrouk tells him, too, that he will find them. All three set
out. When they have gone a little way they find an old woman, who
says to them:
"Where are you going to in that fashion?"
"To look for the king's three daughters."
This old woman says to them:
"Go to the king, and ask him for three hundred fathoms of new rope,
a bucket, and a bell."
They go, and the king gives to them immediately what they ask for. They
go, then, to the woman, and she says to them, pointing to a well,
that they are in that well. [76] The eldest put himself into the
bucket, and says to them:
"When I am afraid, I will ring the bell."
When he has gone only a little way he is frightened, and rings. They
pull him up. The second goes; and when he has gone a little farther
down he is frightened, and rings. Malbrouk then gets in, and he says
to them:
"When I shall give a pull at the bucket from below, then you will
pull it up."
He goes down, then, and at last he sees that there is a beautiful
house underground, and he sees there a beautiful young lady, who is
sitting with a serpent asleep in her lap. When she sees Malbrouk,
she says to him:
"Be off, I pray you, from here; he has only three-quarters of an hour
to sleep, and if he wakes, it is all over with you and me."
He says to her, "No matter; lay the head of the serpent on the ground,
gently, gently, without waking him."
She lays it there, and he carries off this young lady in the bucket,
after having pulled the cord. He goes into another chamber, and he
sees another young lady, still more beautiful, with the head of a
lion asleep on her lap. She also says to him:
"Be off quickly from here. He has only half-an-hour to sleep, and if
he wakes, it is all up with you and me."
Malbrouk says to her, "Place gently, gently, without waking him,
the head of the lion on the ground."
She does so. Malbrouk takes her, gets into the bucket with her, and
his brothers pull them both up. They write at once to the king to
come and fetch them, that they have found two of his daughters. As
you may suppose, the king sends a carriage directly to fetch them,
and he makes great rejoicings. The king tells him to choose whichever
of the two he likes for his wife. Malbrouk says to him:
"When I shall have found your third daughter she shall be my wife,
and my two brothers may take these two young ladies for their wives."
They do as Malbrouk said, and he sets out to see his sweetheart. He
goes on, and on, and on. All the fowls of the air know Malbrouk. As
he was going along he finds a wolf, a dog, a hawk, and an ant, and
in their language they cry out:
"Oyhu! [77] Malbrouk, Malbrouk!" and saying to him, "Where are you
going, Malbrouk? these three days we have been here before this sheep,
and cannot agree how to divide it; but you, you shall divide it."
Malbrouk goes to them, then, trembling lest they should make a division
of him, too. He cuts off the head, and gives it to the ant.
"You will have enough to eat, and for your whole household."
He gives the entrails to the hawk, and for the dog and the wolf he
cuts the carcase in half. He left them all well satisfied; and Malbrouk
goes on his way in silence, in silence. When he had gone a little way,
the ant says:
"We have not given Malbrouk any reward."
The wolf calls to him to come back. Malbrouk comes trembling,
thinking that it was his turn, and that they are going to eat him,
without doubt. The ant says to him:
"We have not given you anything, after that you have made such a
good division for us; but whenever you wish to become an ant, you
have only to say, 'Jesus, ant!' and you will become an ant."
The hawk says to him: "When you wish to make yourself a hawk, you
will say, 'Jesus, hawk!' and you will be a hawk."
The wolf says to him: "When you shall wish to become a wolf, you
shall say, 'Jesus, wolf!' and you shall be a wolf."
And the dog, he said to him the same thing, too. [78] He goes off,
then, well pleased, further into the forest. A woodpecker says to him:
"Malbrouk, where are you going?"
"To fetch such a daughter of a king."
"You will not find her easily. Since they have delivered her sisters,
he has carried her to the farther side of the Red Sea, [79] in an
island, and keeps her there in prison, in a beautiful house, with
the doors and windows so closely shut that only the ants can get into
that house."
Malbrouk goes off happy at hearing this news, and that he would find
the princess. He goes on, and on, and on, and he arrives opposite to
this island, and remembering what the hawk had said to him, he said,
"Jesus, hawk!" and immediately he becomes a hawk. [80] He flies away,
and goes on until he comes to the island of which the woodpecker had
told him; he sees that he can only get in there like an ant, and he
says, "Jesus, ant!" and he gets through the little lattice-work. He
is dazed at the sight of the beauty of this young lady. He says,
"Jesus, man!" and he becomes a man again. When the young lady sees him,
she says to him:
"Be off quickly from here. It is all over with your life. He is about
to come, this horrible body without a soul, [81] before a quarter of
an hour, and you will be done away with."
"I will become an ant again, and I will place myself in your bosom;
but do not scratch yourself too hard, else you will crush me."
As soon as he has said that the monster comes. He gives her partridges
and pigeons for her dinner, but he himself eats serpents and horrible
vermin. He tells her that he has a slight headache, and to take the
hammer and rap him on the head. She could not lift it, it was so big;
but she knocks him as well as she is able. The monster goes off. The
ant comes out from where he was, and prepares to eat the partridges
and pigeons with the young lady. Malbrouk said to her:
"You must ask him, as if you were in great trouble about it, what
would have to be done to kill him? and you will tell him how unhappy
you would be if he should be killed--that you would die of hunger in
prison in this island."
The young lady says, "Yes," she will do so.
The monster comes again, and says to her:
"Ay! ay! ay! my head. Take the hammer, and hit me hard."
The young lady does it until she is tired, and then she says:
"How unfortunate I shall be if you die."
He answers, "I shall not die. He who will know that will know a
great secret."
"Most certainly I would not wish you to die. I should die of hunger
in this island without you, and I should get no benefit by it. You
ought to tell me what would kill you."
He says to her, "No! Before this, too, a woman has deceived a man,
and I will not tell you."
"You can tell it to me--yes, to me. To whom shall I tell it? I see
nobody. Nobody is able to come here."
At last, at last, he tells her then:
"You must kill a terrible wolf which is in the forest, and inside him
is a fox, in the fox is a pigeon; this pigeon has an egg in his head,
and whoever should strike me on the forehead with this egg would kill
me. [82] But who will know all that? Nobody."
The princess said to him, "Nobody, happily. I, too, I should die."
The monster goes out as before, and the ant too, as you may think,
happy in knowing the secret. On the very next day he sets out for the
forest. He sees a frightful wolf. He says, directly, "Jesus, wolf!" and
he immediately becomes a wolf. He then goes to this wolf, and they
begin to fight, and he gets him down and chokes him. He leaves him
there, and goes off to the young lady in the island, and says to her:
"We have got the wolf; I have killed him, and left him in the forest."
The monster comes directly afterwards, saying:
"Ay! ay! ay! my head! Strike my head quickly."
She hits his head till she is tired. He says to the princess:
"They have killed the wolf; I do not know if anything is going to
happen to me. I am much afraid of it."
"You have nothing to be afraid of. To whom could I have told
anything? Nobody can get in here."
When he has gone, the ant goes to the forest. He opens the wolf, and
out of him comes a fox, who escapes at full speed. Malbrouk says,
"Jesus, dog!" and he becomes a dog. He, too, sets off running, and
catches the fox. They begin to fight, and he kills him, too. He opens
him, and there comes out of him a pigeon. Malbrouk says, at once,
"Jesus, hawk!" and he becomes a hawk. He flies off to catch the pigeon,
seizes him in his terrible talons, and takes out of his head this
precious egg, and goes proudly with it into the chamber of the young
lady. He tells how he has very happily accomplished his business,
and says to her:
"At present, it is your turn; act alone."
And again he makes himself an ant. Our monster comes, crying, that it
is all up with him, that they have taken the egg out of the pigeon,
and that he does not know what must become of him. He tells her to
strike him on the head with the hammer.
The young lady says to him:
"What have you to fear? Who shall have got this egg? And how should
he strike your forehead?"
He shows her how, saying, "Like that."
As the young lady had the egg in her hand, she strikes the monster
as he had told her, and he falls stark dead. In an instant the ant
comes out joyously (from his hiding-place), and he says to her:
"We must set out instantly for your father's house."
They open a window, and the young man makes himself a hawk, and he
says to the young lady:
"Cling firmly to my neck."
And he flies off, and they arrive at the other side of the island. He
writes immediately to the king his lord, to send and fetch them as
quickly as possible. The king sent; and judge what joy and what feasts
there were in that court. The king wished them to marry directly,
but Malbrouk would not do so. (He said) that he ought to bring his
dowry. The king said to him:
"You have gained enough already."
He will not hear of that, but goes off far, far, far away, to the
house of his godfather.
They had there a cow with golden horns, and these horns bore fruits of
diamonds. A boy used to guard her in the field. Malbrouk said to him:
[83]
"What! do you not hear that the master is calling you? Go, quickly,
then, and learn what he wants of you."
The boy, (believing it), goes off. The master calls to him from
the window:
"Where are you going to, leaving the cow? Go quickly; I see that
Malbrouk is about there."
The boy sets off running back, but he cannot find the cow. Malbrouk
had got off proudly with his cow, and he gives it to his future wife,
who was very much pleased with it. The king wished him, then, to marry,
(saying) that he was quite rich enough. Malbrouk would not yet. He
must make a present to the king. He goes again to his godfather's
house. He wished to steal from him a moon, which lighted for seven
leagues round. Old Malbrouk used to drink a barrel of water every
night. Young Malbrouk goes and empties this barrel. When night came,
Malbrouk goes to drink at his barrel, and finds it empty. He goes to
find his wife, and says to her:
"I have not got a drop of water; go directly, and fetch me some. I
cannot bear this thirst."
His wife said to him, "It is night, light your moon." He lights it,
and puts it by the chimney, on the roof. When everyone has gone to
the fountain, young Malbrouk goes and takes this moon, and carries
it to the king. And he, astonished, said to him:
"Now you have done grandly; now be married."
But he would not; (he said) that he ought to bring something more. His
godfather had a violin, which it was enough only to touch for it to
play, no matter what beautiful music, and it would be heard seven
leagues off. He goes into his godfather's house to take the violin,
and as soon as he has touched it, it begins to play music. Old Malbrouk
rushes off, and catches his godson in the act. He seizes him, and puts
him into an iron cage. He and his wife are right well pleased. They
say to him:
"This evening we are going to roast you, and eat you."
Old Malbrouk goes to the forest to fetch wood, and his wife was busy
cutting some small--she was taking a great deal of trouble about
it. Malbrouk says to her:
"Let me get out of here; I will cut that wood for you. You can kill
me all the same this evening."
She lets him out. After having cut up some, he takes one of the
largest pieces and strikes the wife of Malbrouk, and kills her. He
makes a great fire, and puts her in the caldron to boil. He takes
the violin, and leaves the house. When old Malbrouk hears the violin,
he says to himself:
"My wife, not being able to hold out any longer, has, doubtless,
killed Malbrouk, and to show me her joy she has taken the violin."
And he does not trouble himself any more about it. When he approaches
the house he stands, well pleased, looking at the caldron on the
fire, but, on coming nearer, he sees some long hairs. He pulls out a
little more, and perceives that it is his wife, who is there already,
half-boiled. Think what a rage he was in. The young Malbrouk went to
the king's house, and married his well-beloved princess. They made
great rejoicings. As the king was somewhat aged, he gives his crown to
Malbrouk, saying that he had well gained it. They all lived happily,
and he made his two brothers kings also.
Laurentine,
About 35 years old; learnt it from her mother.
THE FISHERMAN AND HIS SONS.
Like many others in the world, there was a fisherman who lived with his
wife. One day he was fishing and caught a fine fish (at that time all
the animals and everything used to speak), and the fish said to him:
[84]
"Spare my life! Spare my life! I will give you all that you shall
desire."
And this poor man spared its life, and went home without having caught
anything else. When he came home his wife asks him:
"Where are your fish?"
He tells her how that he had caught a fish, and that it had begged
him to spare its life, and that he had left it in the water. His wife
says to him:
"Have you lost your head then? After having caught a fish to put it
back again into the water!"
And she called him all sorts of names, even "big donkey."
The next day he goes fishing again, and (what a chance!) the same fish
came again. It asks him again to spare its life. But the man answers:
"No! My wife loaded me with abuse last evening."
The fish said to him that he would give him as much money as he wished
if he would but spare him. And our fisherman lets him go again. He
remains there again all day, but nothing comes to his hook. Again
he goes off home without anything at all. His wife is furious at
seeing that he has nothing. He gives her some money, but she was not
satisfied, and told her husband that he ought to have brought the fish.
He goes fishing again for the third time, and again the same fish
returns, and says to him, "Let me go into the water."
But our man will not let him go again; his wife had scolded him so
much last night. He must carry him home.
"Well, then, since you will carry me home, I will tell you how you
must divide me. You must give my tail to the dog, my head to the
mare, and my trunk to your wife. At the end of a certain time your
wife will bear three sons, and they will all be exactly like each
other, exactly alike. The mare will have three colts, but all three
alike, and the bitch three puppies, all exactly alike too. And if
any misfortune should happen to any of the three children, the well
which is behind the house will begin to boil."
The woman did as the fish had said, and she gave birth to three
wonderfully fine boys, who were all exactly, exactly alike, and
the mare had three colts exactly alike, and the bitch three puppies
exactly alike too.
When these children grew big, one of them said to his parents that
he wished to go from country to country to see the world. His parents
did not wish it. But he had such a desire that at last they gave him
leave. He takes a horse and a dog, extraordinarily large and handsome,
a sword also, [85] and off he starts. He goes on, and on, very,
very far. He comes to a city and goes to an inn. They were lamenting
loudly there, and everybody was sad. [86] He asks, "What is it?" They
tell him how that a serpent with seven heads lived in the mountain,
and that every day they drew lots to know who should go to him,
because he must eat one person every day; and that to-day the lot
has fallen on the king's daughter, and that everyone was in mourning,
and that the next day this princess must go very early to the mountain.
Our young man takes his horse, his dog, and his sword, and starts off
before the princess. He keeps himself hidden until the princess was
alone at the top. Then our lad comes out, and the princess says to him:
"Where do you come from here? Go down quickly, else you will be eaten
as well as I. It is quite enough for one (to die)."
And she entreats him to go down, but our lad will not. He wishes to try
if he can do anything. At the same moment they hear a shrill hissing,
and with that the serpent comes. The lad says to the dog:
"Do your duty."
And the dog leaps upon the serpent and holds him. He takes his sword
and cuts off his seven heads as best he can. When he has done that
he takes the seven tongues out of the seven heads and puts them in
his pocket. This princess had on seven robes, each more beautiful
than the others, and he cuts seven pieces out of them severally. The
princess does not know what to do to thank him. She wishes to take
the lad home with her, but he will not go. And he returns to the inn.
The king proclaims that the man who has killed the serpent has gained
the half of his kingdom, and his daughter; that he should make himself
known. Our lad does not show himself at all, but a charcoal-burner [87]
passing by on the mountain found the seven heads. He presents himself
before the king as if he had killed the serpent. But the princess does
not recognise him, and says that it is not he who has saved her. But
as no one else came the marriage was about to be celebrated, when the
princess pointed out to her father from a distance her rescuer. The
king would not believe her. But they send and fetch him, and tell
the charcoal-burner to show the seven heads of the serpent, and he
shows them with great boldness. Our young man tells him to open their
mouths. He does so, and the mouths had no tongues. Then he who had
killed the serpent shows the seven tongues, and the seven pieces of
the princess' robes, and they were all convinced that he had killed
the serpent; and they burned the charcoal-burner alive in the middle
of the market-place.
Our young man marries the princess, and they had many and great
rejoicings because he had delivered all the world from the terrible
serpent. In the evening, when they retired to their chamber, the
wife knelt down to say her prayers, and the husband went and looked
out of the window, and he saw by the moonlight a magnificent castle,
[88] which he had never seen before.
He asks his wife:
"What is that?"
His wife says to him:
"Nobody goes to that castle, for they who go there never return." [89]
The husband said to her that he must go there. His wife did not
wish it, but he had such a desire to do so that he takes his horse,
his dog, and his sword, and goes off. He looks round and round (the
castle), but he cannot find the door. At last he finds a little door
half hidden, very small. He knocks. An old woman comes to him, and
asks him what he wants.
He says, "I have seen this castle so beautiful outside, that I am
anxious to see the inside."
She shows him in. He sees a table splendidly laid out. There was
nothing that there was not on the table. This woman invites him
to take something. He says that he does not want anything, but she
insists so much that he ends by taking something. As soon as he has
eaten the first mouthful he becomes a terrible monster, and by no
means could he get out of that house.
The water begins to boil at home, as the fish had said. All those
in the house are grieved because some misfortune has happened to the
son. One of the brothers at home said that he would immediately set
out to the help of his brother. Those at home are very sorry, but they
let him go. He takes a horse and a dog. The father and mother give him
all the money that they can give him, and he starts off. He goes on,
and on, and on, and, as was fated, [90] he comes to the same inn as
his brother. There they recognise him. They inform the king that the
gentleman is at the house, because he had had a search made for him
through all the neighbourhood. They come and fetch him out of his
corner, and he lets them do as they wish. A great supper was made,
and he goes off with the princess. As before, the princess knelt down
to pray. The young man goes to look out of the window, and sees this
palace. He asks her what this beautiful castle is. She says to him:
"You do not know what takes place there! They who go there never
return."
He says that he will start off directly. His wife asks him if he will
return to that castle as before. "Do not go, I pray you."
But nothing could have stopped him, and off he goes with his horse
and his dog. Like the other brother, he goes wandering round and round
the house without finding the door. At last he sees a very little door
half hidden. He knocks at it, and the old woman comes and says to him:
"What do you want?"
"I have seen the outside of this castle, and I wish to see the inside."
She tells him to come in. He leaves his horse and his dog outside,
and he sees a table splendidly set out; one could not mention anything
that was wanting, there was something of everything. She tells him to
eat something. He did not wish to, but at last he takes something,
(so little, that it was) almost nothing. At the first mouthful he
becomes a terrible monster, and cannot in any way get out.
The water at home begins to boil, and they know that some misfortune
has happened to him.
The third brother said that he must set out as quickly as possible. The
parents did not wish it, but he said to them:
"Perhaps I shall save them; let me go."
They give him as much money as they can. He takes a horse and a dog,
and off he starts. He goes on, and on, and on. He also goes to the
same inn as his other brothers. He is recognised immediately, and
the king is informed that this young gentleman is there. He sends
to fetch him immediately, and makes great feastings and rejoicings,
thinking that it is always the same as their first young gentleman. In
the evening he is conducted to the princess. The princess kneels down
to say her evening prayers, and her husband, wishing to see a little
more of the festival, placed himself at the window. He also sees the
beautiful castle. He asks his wife:
"What is this beautiful house?"
She says to him, "What! You! Do not you know what it is? No one returns
from there. You know yourself what happens there, since you have been
there yourself."
He said to her, "I must go and see it again."
The princess would not let him go; but he broke away from her. He
takes his horse and his dog, and starts off. He looks, and looks
all round, and cannot find the door. An old woman appears to him,
and says to him--
"What do you think will become of you here? They who go in there do
not come out."
"But that is why I wish to go in, to know what passes within."
Then the old woman gives him a pigeon, cooked and prepared for eating,
and said to him,
"Inside there is an old woman. She will try and force you to eat;
but, if you are wise, you will not eat. You will show her the pigeon
that you have in your pocket which remains after your repast, and you
must make her eat some of the pigeon, and you will have full power
over her."
When he has found the door, he knocks. This old woman comes, and asks
him what he wants. He says that he only wishes to see this house. She
lets him in. He takes his dog, also, with him. He sees this splendid
table. She wishes absolutely to make him eat; but he says that it
is altogether impossible--that he has in his pocket a pigeon which
he has not been able to eat, and that she must eat some of that. The
old woman says she will not. He compels her, and tells her she must;
and at last she eats it. He then asks her what she has done with his
brothers. She says that she knows nothing about them; that she does
not know what he means. He forces her to tell him, and says to her,
"I will make my dog strangle you if you do not tell me."
He frightens her so, that she shows him some terrible monsters. He
tells her to restore them as they were before, otherwise some
misfortune shall happen to her, and to mind what she is about. At
last she set to work to change them as they were before, and their
horses and dogs as well.
They all go to the king's palace, where everyone is immensely
astonished to see three gentlemen arrive exactly alike in all
respects. They ask the princess which is her husband. But the poor
young lady is greatly embarrassed. She could not distinguish them,
because they were exactly alike. At last he who had killed the serpent
said that he was her husband. They make great rejoicings, and give a
great deal of money to the two brothers, and to their parents, and they
went off. They burnt the old woman in the midst of the market-place,
and this handsome castle was given to the newly-married pair, and they
lived happily at court; and, as they lived well, so they died happily.
Catherine Elizondo.
All the latter part of this tale is much more detailed than in
the Gaelic, and it is singular to read this note from Campbell's
collector:--"The Gaelic is given as nearly as possible in the words
used by Mackenzie; but he thinks his story rather shortened." Of
the identity of the two stories there can be no doubt, although each
supplies what is wanting to the other.
TABAKIERA, THE SNUFF-BOX. [91]
Like many others in the world, there was a lad who wished to travel,
and off he went. He finds a snuff-box, and opens it. And the snuff-box
said to him--
"Que quieres?" ("What do you wish for?")
He is frightened, and puts it at once into his pocket. Luckily he
did not throw it away. He goes on, and on, and on, and at last he
said to himself,
"(I wonder) if it would say to me again, 'Que quieres?' I should well
know what to answer."
He takes it out again, and opens it, and it says to him again,
"Que quieres?"
The lad says to it, "My hat full of gold."
And it is filled!
He is astounded, and he said to himself that he would never want
anything any more. He goes on, and on, and on; and, after he had passed
some forests, he arrives at a fine castle. The king lived there. He
goes round, and round, and round it, looking at it with an impudent
air. The king says to him--
"What are you looking for?"
"To see your castle."
"You would wish, too, to have one like it?"
The lad does not answer. When the evening came, our lad takes out
his snuff-box, and it said to him,
"Que quieres?"
"Build here, on this very spot, a castle, with laths of gold and
silver, and diamond tiles, and with all its furniture of gold and
silver." [92]
As soon as he has said it, he sees in front of the king's castle
a castle like what he had asked for. When the king gets up in the
morning, he was astonished at this dazzling castle. His eyes were
blinded by the (reflection of the) rays of the sun which fell upon
it. The king went and said to him--
"You must be a man of great power, [93] and you must come to our
house, where we will live together. I have a daughter, too, and you
shall marry her."
They do as the king had said, and they lived all together in the
dazzling house. He was married to the king's daughter, and lived
happily.
Now, the king's wife was very envious of the lad and of his wife. She
knew, by her daughter, how that they had a snuff-box, and that it did
all that they wished. She intrigued with one of the servants to try and
take it from them; but they take great care (to conceal) where they put
the snuff-box away every evening. Nevertheless, at last she sees where
it is put, and in the middle of the night, while they slept, she takes
it from them, and carries it to her old mistress. What a joy for her!
She opens it, and the snuff-box says to her, "Que quieres?"
"You must take myself and my husband, and my servants, and this
beautiful house, to the other side of the Red Sea, [94] and leave my
daughter and her husband here."
When the young couple awoke in the morning, they found themselves
in the old castle, and their snuff-box was gone. They look for it
everywhere, but it is useless.
The young man will not wait an instant longer at home. He must start
off at once to find his castle and his snuff-box. He takes a horse,
and as much gold as the horse can carry, and he goes on, and on, and
on, and on. He searches through all the towns in the neighbourhood
until he had finished all his money. He searched, but he did not
find it anywhere. But he went looking out still, feeding his horse
as best he could, and begging for himself. Some one told him that he
ought to go to the moon--that he makes a very long journey, and that
he might guide him. He goes far, far, far away, on, and on, and on,
and at last he arrives. He finds an old woman, who says to him--
"What do you come to do here? My son devours all creatures of all
sorts; and, if you will trust me, you will be off before his arrival."
He tells her his misfortunes--how that he had a snuff-box of great
power, which has been stolen from him, and that he is now without
anything, far from his wife, and stripped of everything, "and perhaps
your son, in his journeys, has seen my palace, with its golden laths
and tiles of diamonds, and the other ornaments of gold and silver."
At that moment the moon appeared, and said to his mother that he
smelt some one. His mother told him how that there was a wretched
man who had lost everything; that he was come to him (for help), and
that he would guide him. The moon told him to show himself. He comes,
and asks him if he has not seen a house with beams of gold and with
tiles of diamonds, and the rest of gold and silver; and he tells him
how it was taken away from him.
He answers, "No;" that he has not seen it, but that the sun makes
longer journeys than he, and of greater extent, and that he would do
better to go to him.
He goes off again, on, and on, and on, with his horse, whom he
nourished as he could, and begging for himself. At length he arrives
at the sun's house. He finds an old woman, who said to him,
"Where do you come from? Be off from here! Do you not know that my
son eats all Christians?"
He said to her, "No! I will not go away. I am so wretched that I do
not care if he does eat me."
And he tells her how he has lost everything; that he had a house,
which had not its equal, with beams of gold and tiles of diamonds,
and all the ornaments of gold and precious stones; and that he had
been going about looking for it so long a time, and that there was
no man so wretched as he. This woman hides him. The sun comes out
and says to his mother--
"I smell the smell of a Christian, and I must eat him."
The mother tells him that it was an unfortunate man who had lost his
all, that he had come to speak to him, and begs him to take pity on
him. He tells her to bring him out. Then the young man comes and
asks the sun if he has seen a palace which has its equal nowhere,
with its laths of gold and its tiles of diamonds, and the rest of
gold and silver. The sun says to him:
"No, but the south wind searches everything that I cannot see. He
enters into every corner, he does, and if any one ought to know he
will know."
Our poor man then sets off again, feeding his horse how he could and
begging for himself, and he comes at length to the house of the south
wind. [95] He finds an old woman carrying water, and who was filling
a great many barrels. She said to him:
"What are you thinking of to come here? My son eats up everything
when he arrives hungry and furious. You must beware of him."
He says to her, "It is all the same to me. Let him eat me; I am so
wretched that I fear nothing."
And he tells her how he had a beautiful house which had not its
equal in all the world, and with it all sorts of riches, and that,
"Having abandoned my wife, I am seeking it, and I am come to consult
your son, being sent by the sun."
She hides him under the staircase. The south wind arrives as if he
meant to tear the house up, and very thirsty. Before beginning to drink
he smells the smell of the race of Christians, and said to his mother:
"Out with what you have hidden," and that he must begin by eating him.
His mother said to him, "Eat and drink what is before you."
And she tells him the misfortunes of this man, and how that the sun
has spared his life that he might come and consult him.
Then he makes the man come out, and the man tells him how that he
is going about trying to find a house, and that if anybody ought to
know it is he, and that they had robbed him of his house, which had
laths of gold, tiles of diamonds, and all the rest of gold and silver,
and if he has not seen it anywhere?
He tells him, "Yes, yes, and all to-day I have been passing over it,
and have not been able to take away one of its tiles."
"Oh! if you will tell me where it is!"
He says that it is on the other side of the Red Sea, very, very
far away.
When our man heard that, the length of the road did not frighten
him--he had already travelled over so much. He sets out then,
and at last arrives at that city. He asks if anyone is in want of a
gardener. They tell him that the gardener of the castle has gone away,
and that perhaps they will take him. He goes off, and recognises his
house--judge with what joy and delight! He asks if they are in want
of a gardener. They tell him "Yes," and our lad is very pleased. He
passes some time tolerably happily--middling. He talks with a servant
about the riches of the masters and of the power which they had. He
flattered and cajoled this young girl very much to get from her the
history of the snuff-box, and he told her once that he very much wished
to see it. One evening she brought it to him to look at, and our lad,
very much pleased, pays great attention to where it was hidden in
the room of the mistress. At night, when everybody is asleep, he goes
and takes the snuff-box. You will understand with what joy he opens it.
It says to him, "Que quieres?"
And the lad says to it, "Que quieres, Que quieres, [96] carry me with
my castle to the same place as (we were in) formerly, and drown the
king and the queen and all the servants in this Red Sea."
As soon as he had said it, he was carried to his wife, and they lived
happily, and the others all perished in the Red Sea. [97]
Catherine Elizondo.
MAHISTRUBA, THE MASTER MARINER.
Like many others in the world, there was a master mariner. Having had
many losses and misfortunes in his life he no longer made any voyages,
but every day went down to the seaside for amusement, and every day
he met a large serpent, and every day he said to it:
"God has given thy life to thee; live then."
This master mariner lived upon what his wife and daughter earned by
sewing. One day the serpent said to him:
"Go to such a shipbuilder's, and order a ship of so many tons
burden. Ask the price of it, and then double the price they tell
you." [98]
He does as the serpent told him, and the next day he goes down to
the shore, and he tells the serpent that he has done as he had told
him. The serpent then bids him go and fetch twelve sailors, very strong
men, and to double whatever they shall ask. He goes and does what he
was told to do. He returns to the serpent and tells him that he has
twelve men. The serpent gives him all the money which he needed to
pay for the ship. The shipbuilder is astonished to find that he is
paid so large a sum of money in advance by this miserable man, but he
hastens to finish his work as quickly as possible. The serpent again
bids him have made in the hold of the ship a large empty space and a
huge chest, and tells him to bring this down himself. He brings it,
and the serpent gets into it. The ship was quickly ready, he embarks
the chest in the ship, and they set out.
This captain used to go every day to the serpent, but the sailors did
not know what he went (into the hold) to do, nor what there was in
the chest. The ship had already gone some distance, and nobody knew
its destination. One day the serpent told the captain that there was
going to be a frightful storm, that the earth and sky would mingle
together, and that at midnight a large black bird would pass over
the ship, and that it must be killed, and (he tells him) to go and
see if there is any sportsman among his sailors. He goes and asks
the sailors if there is any sportsman among them. [99]
One of them answers, "Yes; I can kill a swallow in its flight."
"All the better, all the better; that will be of use to you."
He goes down to tell the serpent that there is a sportsman who can
kill a swallow in its flight. And at the same moment the weather
becomes black as night, and earth and sky are mingled together, and
all are trembling with fright. The serpent gives the captain a good
drink for the sportsman, and they bind him to the mast. At midnight
a piercing cry was heard. It was the bird which was passing over,
and our sportsman has the good luck to kill him. At the very instant
the sea becomes calm. The captain goes to the serpent, and tells him
that the bird is killed.
The serpent answers him, "I know it."
When they had gone a little further without anything happening,
the serpent said one day:
"Are we not near such a port?"
The captain says to him, "It is in sight."
"Very well, then, we are going there."
He tells him to go again, and ask his sailors if there is a fast
runner among them. The captain goes and asks his sailors if there is
any fast runner among them.
One of them says to him, "As for me, I can catch a hare running."
"So much the better, so much the better; that will be of use to you."
The captain goes to tell the serpent that there is one who can catch
a hare running. The serpent says to him:
"You will land the runner at this port, and you will tell him that he
must go to the top of a little mountain; that there is a little house
there, and an old, old woman in it; and that there is there a steel,
a flint, and a tinder-box; and that he must bring these three things
on board one by one, making a separate journey each time."
Our runner goes off, and comes to this house. He sees the old woman,
with red eyes, spinning at the threshold of her door. He asks her
for a drop of water, that he has walked a long way without finding
any water, and will she give him a little drop? The old woman says
to him, "No." He begs her again, telling her that he does not know
the roads in the country, nor where he is going to. This old woman
kept constantly looking at the chimney-piece, and she said to him:
"I am going to give you some, then."
While she went to the pitcher, our runner takes the steel off the
chimney-piece, and goes off at full speed, like the lightning; but
the old woman is after him. At the very instant that he is about
to leap into the ship the old woman catches him, and snatches off a
bit of his coat, and a piece of the skin of his back with it. [100]
The captain goes to the serpent, and says to him:
"We have got the steel, but our man has got the skin of his back
torn off."
He gives him a remedy, and a good drink, and tells him that the man
will be cured by to-morrow, but that he must go again next day.
He says, "No, no; the devil may carry off this old woman, if he likes,
but I will not go there any more."
But, as he was cured next day by giving him that good drink again,
he sets off. He dresses himself in a shirt without arms, and in an
old torn pair of trousers, and goes to the old woman's, saying that
his ship is wrecked on the shore, that he has been wandering about
for forty-eight hours, and he begs her to let him go to the fire to
light his pipe.
She says, "No."
"Do have pity--I am so wretched; it is only a little favour I ask
of you."
"No, no, I was deceived yesterday."
But the man answered, "All the world are not deceivers. Don't be
afraid."
The old woman rises to go to the fire, and as she stoops to take it,
[101] the man seizes the flint and escapes, running as if he would
break his feet. But the old woman runs as fast as our runner; but
she only catches him as he is jumping into the ship; she tears off
the shirt, and the skin of his neck and back with it, and he falls
into the ship.
The captain goes directly to the serpent: "We have got the flint."
He says to him, "I know it."
He gives him the medicine and the good drink, in order that the man
may be cured by the morrow, and that he may go again. But the man
says, "No," that he does not want to see that red-eyed old woman any
more. They tell him that they still want the tinder-box. The next day
they give him the good drink. That gives him courage, and the desire
to return again.
He dresses himself up as if he had been shipwrecked, and goes off
half naked. He comes to the old woman's, and asks for a little bread,
as he has not eaten for a long time, (and begs her) to have pity on
him--that he does not know where to go to.
The old woman says to him: "Be off, where you will; you shall get
nothing at my house, and nobody shall come in here. Every day I
have enemies."
"But what have you to fear from a poor man who only wants a little
bread, and who will be off immediately afterwards?"
At last the old woman rises to go to her cupboard, and our man takes
her little tinder-box. The old woman runs after him, wishing to catch
him, but our man is ahead. She overtakes him just as he is leaping into
the ship. The old woman takes hold of the skin of his neck, and tears
it all right down to the soles of his feet. Our runner falls down, and
they do not know whether he is alive or dead; and the old woman says:
"I renounce him, and all those who are in this ship."
The captain goes to the serpent, and says to him:
"We have the tinder-box, but our runner is in great danger. I do not
know whether he will live; he has no skin left from his neck to the
soles of his feet."
"Console yourselves, console yourselves, he will be cured by
to-morrow. Here is the medicine and the good drink. Now, you are
saved. Go on deck, and fire seven rounds of cannon."
He mounts on deck and fires the seven rounds of cannon, and returns
to the serpent, and says to him:
"We have fired the seven rounds."
He says to him, "Fire twelve rounds more; but do not be afraid. The
police will come here; they will handcuff you. You will be put in
prison, and you will ask, as a favour, not to be executed before that
they have visited the ship, in order to prove that there is nothing
in it to merit such a chastisement."
The captain goes on deck, and fires the twelve rounds of cannon. As
soon as he has fired them, the magistrates and the police arrive;
they handcuff the men, the sailors, and the captain, and they put them
in prison. The sailors were not pleased; but the captain said to them:
"You will soon be delivered."
The next day the captain asks to go and speak to the king. He is
brought before the king, and the king says:
"You are condemned to be hanged."
The captain says to him, "What! because we have fired some cannon-shots
you are going to hang us!!"
"Yes, yes, because for seven years we have not heard the cannon in
this city. [102] I am in mourning--I and my people. I had an only son,
and I have lost him. I cannot forget him."
The captain says to him: "I did not know either this news or this
order, and I beg you not to kill us before going and seeing if there
is anything in the ship which condemns us justly."
The king goes with his courtiers, his soldiers, and his judges--in a
word, with everybody. When he has mounted on deck, what a surprise! The
king finds his dearly-loved son, who relates to him how he had been
enchanted by an old woman, and that he remained a serpent seven
years. [103] How the captain every day went to walk by the seaside,
and every day left him his life, saying to him, "The good God has
made you too;" and having seen the captain's good heart, "I thought
he would spare me, and it is to him that I owe my life."
He goes to the court. The men are let out of prison, and they give the
captain a large sum of money for a dowry for his two daughters, and
the ship for himself. To the sailors they give as much as they like to
eat and drink for all the time they wish to stop there, and afterwards
enough to live upon for the rest of their lives. The king and his
son lived happily, and as they had lived well, they died happily also.
Gachina,
The Net-maker.
DRAGON.
A king had a son who was called Dragon. He was as debauched as it
is possible to be. All the money that he had he had spent, and still
more; not having enough, he demanded his portion from his father. The
father gives it him immediately, and he goes off, taking with him a
companion who had been a soldier, and who was very like himself. [104]
Very quickly they spent all their money. While they were travelling
in a forest they see a beautiful castle. They enter and find there
a table ready set out, and a magnificent supper prepared. They sit
down to table and sup. Nobody appears as yet, and they go up-stairs
to see the house, and they find the beds all ready, and they go to
bed. They pass a very good night. The next morning Dragon gets up
and opens the shutters, and sees a dazzling garden.
He goes down into the garden, still without seeing anybody; but in
passing under a fig tree, a voice says to him:
"Ay! ay! ay! what pain you have put me to, and what suffering you
are causing me!"
He turns on all sides and finds nothing. He says:
"Who are you? You! I do not understand it. Appear!"
The voice says to him, "I cannot to-day; but perhaps to-morrow you will
see me. But in order to do that you will have to suffer severely."
He promises to suffer no matter what for her. The voice says to him:
"To-morrow night they will make you suffer every kind of torture,
but you must not say anything; and if you do that, you will see
me to-morrow."
They had spoken all this before the soldier friend, but he had heard
nothing of it.
They go to the house and find the dinner quite ready. Dragon would
have wished that night had already come, to know what it was he was
to see. He goes off to bed then, and after eleven o'clock he feels
that something is coming, and his whole body is pricked all over. He
keeps quite silent, because he wished to see the voice. And when the
cock crew "Kukuruku!" he was released (from his torture). He lies
waiting for daybreak to go to the fig tree. Day did not appear as
soon as he would have wished it, and he goes running to the garden
and sees under the fig tree, coming out of the ground as high as her
shoulders, a young girl, and she says to him:
"Last night you have suffered in silence, but the next night they
will make you suffer much more. I do not know if you can bear it
without speaking."
He promises her that he will suffer still more in order to save her.
As usual, they find the table ready for dinner and for supper. He
goes off to bed. There happens to him the same thing as in the
preceding night, but they do him still more harm. Happily he lies
still without speaking. The cock crows "Kukuruku!" and they leave
him quiet. As soon as daylight has come he goes off to the garden,
and he sees the young lady visible as far as the knees. Dragon is
delighted to save this beautiful girl, but she says sadly to him:
"You have seen nothing up to this time. They will make you suffer
twice as much."
He says that he has courage to endure anything, because he wishes to
get her out of that state. When night comes, he perceives that two
are coming instead of one. One of them was lame, and he says to him
(and you know lame people and cripples are the most cruel). [105]
He says then to the other:
"What! You have not been able to make this wretched boy speak! I will
make him speak, I will."
He cuts off his
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