Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/456

416 swan falls in love with the heroine in the human sense: deer can dream human dreams: a swan is made to address the Creator (Kartâ) by way of prayer, and a doe to distinctly pray to God (kîtî Rabb agge faryâd).

The grateful animal is a stock expedient in folktales, and we are treated to instances of all kinds in the Legends, some of which may be called unexpected. Thus, in this category appear cats, crickets, hedgehogs, serpents, swans, crows, cranes. The opposite quality of ingratitude is also ascribed to a deer and a parrot. And in the quaint legend of Dhannâ, the Bhagat, a god consisting of an ordinary commercial stone weight, is made to play the part of the grateful animal, using the term in the sense of a non-human being. But the legend here has more than probably an origin in a consciously allegorical story.

Just as animals can be grateful and ungrateful, so can they be revengeful; and of revenge on human lines there is a fine instance in the tale of the humanised Hîrâ the Deer in the Rasâlu Cycle, who throughout acts the part of the ordinary folk-hero. The tale goes even to the extreme length of attributing caste feelings to the herd he belonged to; for "they cast him out of the herd because he had no ears or tail" (they had been cut off). But perhaps the strongest possible instance of humanisation occurs in the same Cycle, where a lizard as the hero and a female serpent as the heroine play a variant of the story of Potiphar's Wife.

The direct and almost universal use in story of the animal with human attributes is to help on or interfere with the action of the hero in a simple or in an extraordinary manner, as when cranes, crows, parrots, and falcons act as messengers, a falcon takes his turn at keeping watch, and a flock of birds stop the progress of a ship by merely sitting on the shore. In order to do these things they must be able to talk, and do so as naturally and freely as do the men and women themselves. But the use of