Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/20

 10 The Legends of Krishna.

begins to speak, and wanders through the land ; Vali, in the Norse tale, when one night old sallies out to avenge the death of Balder ; and Magni, son of Thor by the giantess Jarnsaxa, when three nights old flings off the giant's foot with which the monster would have crushed his father.^ So the Dayaks have a like marvellous child in Seragunting ; and Robert the Devil, we are told, bit off his nurse's paps and overpowered all the children of his age ; while Tom Hickathrift " at ten years old was six feet high and three feet across, with a hand like a shoulder of mutton^ and everything else proportionable." " As St. Benedict sang Eucharistic hymns before he was born, so in the Zulu folktale there is a child who speaks in the womb of his mother ; the Kafir Simbukumbukwana speaks on the day of his birth ; and the Hindu heroine, Somaprabha, talks the moment she is born.^ Thus this long series of precocious imps passes on to the boy Cadi of the Arabian Nights and the Enfant Terrible of our Punch.^

The feats of the infant Krishna are of the usual class. He upsets a M'aggon loaded with pails of milk ; when he is tethered to a big wooden mortar he drags it away with him ; he pulls down monstrous trees ; and so on.^ As a good example of the evolution of myth the last miracle has been localised at Girnar in Kathiawar, with the Brahmanic gloss that the trees were really divine personages compelled by a curse of some saint to enter the form of trees till they were uprooted by Krishna, the merciful saviour.^

' Grimm, loc. cit., i., 320 seqq.


 * Ling Roth, Natives of Sarawak, i., 198 seqq. ; Hazlitt, National Tales,

59, 431-

^ Callaway, Nursery Tales, i., 6 ; Theal, Kaffir Folklore, 73 ; Tawney, Katha Sarit Sdgara, 1., 1 19, 156. The child of Mamata speaks in the womb, Mahdbhdrata, Adi Parva, sec. 104, Ray trans., i., 314.

■* Burton, Arabiaji Nights (Library Edition), x., 243 ; Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, ii., 12 seqq. ; Miss Stokes, Indian Fairy Tales, 279 seqq.

® Bombay Gazetteer, viii., 441 seqq.
 * Growse, loc. cit., 55 seqq. ; Wilson-Hall, loc. cit., iv., 279 seqq.