Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/517

 Co/Zec/anca. 483

•comes to the village these women are so eager to possess him that they tear him in pieces.

[The Island of Women is a widespread myth. Marco Polo (ed. Sir H. Yule, 1S71, vol. ii., p. 237 S(/.) describes the Male and Female Islands, to which the editor supplies numerous parallels, such as the country of Rana Paramita in the MahCibharata^ and the Country of the Western Women, described by the Buddhist traveller, Hiuen Tsiang (S. Beal, Buddhist Records of the Western World, 1884, vol. ii., pp. 240 sqq., 279). The existence of a Tibetan kingdom of women has been asserted by E. T. Atkinson {Gazetteer of the Himalayan Districts, 1884, vol. ii., p. 458), and by C. H. Sherring {Western Tibet and the Borderland, 1906, p. 338). But Mr. E. Sidney Hartland remarks that the Sui-Shu and T'ang-Shu, quoted by W. \Y. Rockhill {The Land of the Lajnas. New York, 1891, p. 339), only refer to a kingdom in Tibet ruled by a woman, in which men were subordinate to Avomen. This may be one of the rare cases of Matriarchy, or it may be merely a distorted version of the more ordinary Mother- right. We have two instances of this legend from the area adjoining the place where this tale was told. In a tale in the Jdtaka (Cambridge trans, i., iio) the hero visits successively four islands, w^here dwelt four, eight, sixteen, and thirty-two "daughters of the Gods," with whom in each case he leads a happy life until they had to " depart to their punishment," leaving him behind with certain injunctions, which he "immediately disobeys. Mr! E. A. Gait reports that the Sima and Angami Nagas believe in the existence of a village of tiger-men, and another inhabited only by women {Census Report Assam, 189 1, vol. i., p. 250 sq.). One -of the villages in Mang Peng, Northern Shan States, Upper Burma, is said to be at the present day inhabited exclusively by women, for whose seclusion no satisfactory explanation was suggested ^J. G. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, 1901, part ii., vol. ii., p. 201). Mr. Hartland remarks that the tale is very widely distributed. It is told of an island on the west coast of Africa by the ancient geographer, Mela (iii., 9). The tale of the "City of Women" recorded by Major A. J. N. Tremearne (Folk- Lore, xxii., p. 60 et seq.) has possibly been influenced by the Arabian Alights or some otiier Arab story.