Part 7

In _Cendrillon_ the _recognition_ (anagnorisis) makes a great part of the interest. There is no anagnorisis in the Kaffir legend, which is very short, being either truncated or undeveloped.

Let us now turn to the Santals, a remote and shy non-Aryan hill-tribe of India. Here we find the anagnorisis, but in a form not only disappointing but almost cynical[72].

In the Santal story we have the cruel Stepmother, the hero,--not a heroine, but a boy,--the protecting and friendly Cow, the attempt to kill the Cow, the Flight, the great good-fortune of the hero, the Princess who falls in love with a lock of his hair, which is to play the part of Cinderella's glass slipper in the anagnorisis, and, finally, a cynically devised accident, by which the beauty of the hair is destroyed, and the hero's chance of pleasing the princess perishes. It will be noticed that the use of a lock of hair floating down a river, to be fallen in love with and help the _denouement_, is found, first, in the Egyptian _conte_ of the _Two Brothers_, written down in the reign of Ramses II., fourteen hundred years before our era.

In that story, too, the hero has a friendly cow, which warns him when he is in danger of being murdered. But the Egyptian story has no other connection with _Cendrillon_[73]. The device of a floating lock of hair is not uncommon in Bengali _Maerchen_.

From the Santals let us turn to another race, not so remote, but still non-Aryan, the Finns[74]. That the Santals borrow _Maerchen_ from their Hinduised aboriginal neighbours is not certain, but is perfectly possible and even probable. Though some theorists have denied that races borrow nursery tales from each other, it is certain that Loennrot, writing to Schiefner in 1855, mentions a Finnish fisher who, meeting Russian and Swedish fishers, 'swopped stories' with them when stormy weather made it impossible to put to sea[75]. No doubt similar borrowings have always been going on when the peasantry on the frontiers met their neighbours, and where Kaffirs have taken Hottentot wives, or Sidonians have carried off Greek children as captives, in fact, all through the national and tribal meetings of the world[76].

_The Wonderful Birch_ (Emmy Schreck, ix.) is a form of _Cinderella_ from Russian Carelia. The story has a singularly dramatic and original opening. A man and his wife had but one daughter, and one Sheep. The Sheep wandered away, the woman sought him in the woods, and she met a witchwife. The witchwife turned the woman into the semblance of the Sheep, and herself took the semblance of the woman. She went to the woman's house, where the husband thought he was welcoming his own wife and the sheep that was lost. The new and strange stepmother demanded the death of the Sheep, which was the real mother of the heroine. Warned by the Sheep, a black sheep, the daughter did not taste of her flesh, but gathered and buried the bones and fragments. Thence grew a beautiful birch tree. The man and the witchwife went to court, the witchwife leaving the girl to accomplish impossible tasks. The voice of the dead mother from the grave below the birch bade the girl break a twig from the tree, and therewith accomplish the tasks. Then out of the earth came beautiful raiment (as in _Peau d'Ane_), and the girl dressed, and went to court. The Prince falls in love with her, and detects her by means of her ring, which takes the part of the slipper. Then comes in the frequent formula of a false bride substituted by the witchwife, a number of trials, and the punishment of the witch.

Here, then, the friendly beast is but the Mother surviving in two shapes, first as a sheep, then as a tree, exactly the idea of the ancient Egyptian story of the _Two Brothers_, where Bitiou first becomes a bull, and then a persea tree[77]. In Finnish the Cinderella plot is fully developed. A similar tale, still with the beast in place of the Fairy Godmother, is quoted by Mr. Ralston from the Servian (_Vuk Karajich_, No. 32). Three maidens were spinning near a cleft in the ground, when an old man warned them not to let their spindles fall into the cleft, or their mother would be changed into a cow. Mara's spindle fell in, and the mother instantly shared the fate of Io. Mara tended the cow that had been her mother lovingly, but the father married again, and the new wife drove Mara to dwell among the cinders (_pepel_), hence she was called _Pepelluga_, cinderwench[78]. The cruel Servian stepmother had the cow slain, but not before it had warned Mara to eat none of the kindred flesh[79], and to bury the bones in the ashes of the hearth. From these bones sprang two white doves, which supplied Mara with splendid raiment, and, finally, won for her the hand of the prince, after the usual incidents of the lost slipper, the attempt to substitute the stepmother's ugly daughter, and the warning of the fowls, 'Ki erike, the right maiden is under the trough.'

In a modern Greek variant (Hahn, ii.), the Mother (not in vaccine form) is eaten by her daughters, except the youngest, who refuses the hideous meal. The dead woman magically aids the youngest from her tomb, and the rest follows as usual, the slipper playing its accustomed part.

In Gaelic a persecuted stepdaughter is aided by a Ram. The Ram is killed, his bones are buried by his _protegee_, he comes to life again, but is lame, for his bones were not all collected, and he plays the part of Fairy Godmother[80].

Turning from the Gaelic to the Lowland Scotch, we find _Rashin Coatie_ as a name under which either _Peau d'Ane_ or _Cendrillon_ may be narrated. We discovered Cendrillon as _Rashin Coatie_, in Morayshire[81]. Here a Queen does not become a _cow_, indeed, but dies, and leaves to her daughter a _Red Calf_, which aids her, till it is slain by a cruel stepmother.

The dead calfy said

_Tak me up, bane by bane And pit me aneth yon grey stane,_

and whatever you want, come and seek it frae me, and I will give you it.

The usual adventures of Cinderella ensue, the birds denouncing the False Bride, whose foot is pinched to make it fit the 'beautiful satin slipper' of the heroine.

In most of these versions the heroine is aided by a beast, and even when that beast is dead, it continues helpful, in one case actually coming to life again, like the ox in the South African _Maerchen_[82].

In all these thoroughly popular and traditional tales, the supernatural machinery varies much from that of Perrault, who found _Peau d'Ane_ 'difficile a croire.' But, in all the wilder tales, the machinery is exactly what we note in the myths and actual beliefs of the lower races. _They_ do not shrink from the conception of a mother who becomes a cow (like Io), nor of a cow (as in the case of Heitsi Eibib among the Hottentots), who becomes the mother of human progeny. It is not unlikely that the Scotch mother, in _Rashin Coatie_, who bequeathes to her daughter a wonder-working calf (a cow in Sicily, Pitre, 41), is a modification of an idea like that of the cannibal Servian variant[83]. Then the _Mouton_ of Madame d'Aulnoy seems like a courtly survival of the Celtic _Sharp Grey Sheep_ mixed with the _donnee_ of _Beauty and the Beast_[84]. The notion of helpful animals makes all the 'Manitou' element in Red Indian religion, and is common in Australia. The helpful calf, or sheep, bequeathed by the dying mother, reminds one of the equally helpful, but golden Ram, which aids Phrixus and Helle against their stepmother, after the death or deposition of their mother Nephele. This Ram also could speak,--

alla kai auden andromeen proeeke kakon teras[85].

This recalls not only the Celtic _Sharp Grey Sheep_, but also Madame d'Aulnoy and her princess, 'je vous avoue que je ne suis pas accoutumee a vivre avec les moutons qui parlent.'

The older rural and popular forms of _Cinderella_, then, are full of machinery not only supernatural, but supernatural in a wild way: women become beasts, mothers are devoured by daughters (a thing that even Zulu fancy boggles at), life of beast or man is a separable thing, capable of continuing in lower forms. Thus we may conjecture that the ass's skin worn by _Peau d'Ane_ was originally the hide of a beast helpful to her, even connected, maybe, with her dead mother, and that the ass, like the cow, the calf, the sheep, and the doves of _Maerchen_, befriended her, and clothed her in wondrous raiment.

For all these antique marvels Perrault, or the comparatively civilised tradition which Perrault followed, substituted, in _Peau d'Ane_, as in _Cendrillon_, the Christian conception of a Fairy Godmother. This substitute for more ancient and less _speciosa miracula_ is confined to Perrault's tales, and occurs nowhere in purely traditional _Maerchen_. In these as in the widely diffused ballad of the _Re-arisen Mother_--

'Twas late in the night and the bairns grat, The Mother below the mouls heard that,--

the idea of a Mother's love surviving her death inspires the legend, and, despite savage details, produces a touching effect (Ralston, _Nineteenth Century_, Nov. 1879, p. 839).

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

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

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

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

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

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

The attention of mythologists has long been fixed on the _slipper_ of Cinderella. There seems no great mystery in the Prince's proposal to marry the woman who could wear the tiny _mule_. It corresponds to the advantages which, when the hero is a man, attend him who can bend the bow, lift the stone, draw the sword, or the like. In a woman's case it is beauty, in a man's strength, that is to be tested. Whether the slipper were of _verre_ or of _vair_ is a matter of no moment. The slipper is of red satin in Madame d'Aulnoy's _Finette Cendron_, and of satin in _Rashin Coatie_. The Egyptian king, in Strabo and AElian, merely concluded that the loser of the slipper must be a pretty woman, because she certainly had a pretty foot. The test of fitting the owner recurs in _Peau d'Ane_, where a ring, not a slipper, is the object, as in the Finnish _Wonderful Birch tree_.

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

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

In Perrault's _Cinderella_, we have not the adventure of the False or Substituted Bride, which usually swells out this and many other _contes_, and which, indeed, is apparently brought in by popular _conteurs_, whenever the tale is a little short. Thus it frequently winds up the story which Perrault gives so briefly as _Les Fees_. Among the Zulus[89], the Birds of the Thorn country warn the bridegroom that he has the wrong girl,--she is a beast (_mbulu_) in Zululand. The birds give the warning in _Rashin Coatie_[90], and birds take the same part in Swedish, Russian, German, but a dog plays the _role_ in Breton (Reinhold Koehler, _op. cit._ p. 373). In a song of Fauriel's _Chansons Romaiques_ the birds warn the girl that she is riding with a corpse. Birds give the warning in Gaelic (Campbell, No. 14).

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

[Footnote 68: H. H. Risley, _Asiatic Quarterly_, Number III. 'Primitive Marriage in Bengal.']

[Footnote 69: Demosth. _De Corona_, 313, Harpocration, apomattein. Theal, _Kaffir Folk Lore_, p. 22.]

[Footnote 70: _Izinganekwane_, p. 1.]

[Footnote 71: Theal, p. 158.]

[Footnote 72: _Indian Evangelical Review_, Oct. 1886. The collector is Mr. A. Campbell.]

[Footnote 73: Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_, p. 4.]

[Footnote 74: _Finnische Maerchen_, uebersetzt von Emmy Schreck. Weimar, 1887.]

[Footnote 75: Gustav Meyer, _op. cit._ p. xix.]

[Footnote 76: Theal, _op. cit._ p. 3.]

[Footnote 77: Compare the revived Ox. Callaway, _Zulu Nursery Tales_, p. 230; The _Edda_, Mallet, p. 436; _South African Folk Lore Journal_, March, 1880; Aschenpuettel (The Dove and the Hazel tree), Grimm, 21.]

[Footnote 78: In the Catalan version _Ventafochs_, fire-lighter, Italian _Cenerentola_. Deulin _Contes de Ma Mere l'Oye_, pp. 265, 266. In Emmy Schreck the Finnish girl is _Aschenbroedel_, and foul with ashes.]

[Footnote 79: Exophagy.]

[Footnote 80: This is the _Mouton_ of Madame D'Aulnoy, but _he_ is a prodigiously courtly creature, and becomes the _Beast_ who half dies for love and is revived by a kiss. 'Un joli Mouton, brebis doux, bien caressant, ne laisse pas de plaire, surtout quand on scait qu'il est roi, et que la metamorphose doit finir.' But the heroine came too late, and the gallant _Mouton_ expired.]

[Footnote 81: _Revue Celtique_, vol. iii. p. 365.]

[Footnote 82: In the Scandinavian _Katie Wooden cloak_ the buried bull does all for Katie that the Ram, or Cow, or Calf, or Fairy Godmother does for the other Cinderellas.]

[Footnote 83: Herr Koehler quotes M. Luzel's _Chat Noir_, a Breton tale, in which a stepmother kills a cow that befriends Yvonne. Within the dead cow were found two golden slippers. Then comes in the formula of the False Bride (_Rev. Celtique_, 1870, p. 373).]

[Footnote 84: Among the Basutos this happens in 'The Murder of Maciloniane.' Casalis, p. 309: 'The bird was the heart of Maciloniane.']

[Footnote 85: Apoll. Rhod. i. 256. The story of Athamas is an ingenious medley of _Maerchen_, including, as will be shown, part of _Hop o' my Thumb_.]

[Footnote 86: Gubernatis, _Zoolog. Myth._ ii. 5.]

[Footnote 87: A Zulu tale in Callaway, pp. 64, 65, is proof that this was once the Zulu custom.]

[Footnote 88: Elton, _op. cit._ p. 190.]

[Footnote 89: Callaway, p. 121.]

[Footnote 90: _Revue Celtique_, Jan., Nov. 1878, p. 366.]

RIQUET A LA HOUPPE.

_Riquet of the Tuft._