Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/508

426 soldier goes into the forest, and there the ravens which he rescued from starvation are sitting, and say to him, "Have patience for a little longer, the unicorn has only one good eye, and now he is lying on it, and sleeping; but if he turns round, and sleeps on the bad eye, we will peck out the good one. He will then become furious, but, as he will be blind, he will run against the trees in his fury, and stick fast with his horn." Soon afterwards the animal turns in his sleep, and then he lies on the other side, on which the ravens fly to him, and peck out his good eye. He leaps up and runs against an oak-tree and sticks his horn firmly into it. Then the soldier cuts off his head, carries it to the King, and receives in return for it his beautiful daughter, whom he takes to his master, by whom he is royally rewarded.

In Netherlandish, see The Grateful Animals, No 4. in Wolf's Wodana. In Hungarian, see Gaal, No 8. In Persian, Touti-Nameh, No 21 in Iken. A certain King dies and leaves behind him two sons. The elder usurps the crown; the second leaves the country. He comes to a pond where a snake has caught a frog. He calls the snake, which leaves hold of the frog, and it hops back into the water. In order to compensate the snake, he cuts off a bit of his own flesh. To show their gratitude for these benefits, both the frog and the snake come to him in human form and serve him. The prince enters into the service of a King, whose ring falls into the water when he is fishing, and who orders the prince to get it out again for him. The frog-man reassumes the form of a frog, goes into the water, and brings out the ring. Soon afterwards the King's daughter is bitten by a snake, and no one can save her from death but the snake-man, who sucks out the poison from the wound. Thereupon the King gives the prince his daughter to wife. And now the two faithful servants take leave of him, and make themselves known to him respectively as the frog whose life he had saved, and the snake to whom he had given a piece of his own flesh to eat. See the story of Livoret (3, 2) in Straparola. In the Jewish Maasähbuch (chap. 143 of Rabbi Chanina), the King first gets to know about the Princess with the Golden Hair, by a single hair which a bird one day (as in Tristan), lets fall on his shoulders, and which it has plucked from her head while she was bathing. On his way Chanina shows kindness to a raven, a dog, and a fish. The tasks set him are to procure water from Paradise and from hell, and the grateful raven brings a small pitcherful from both places. Then he has to get a ring out of the sea. The fish prevails upon Leviathan, who has swallowed it, to spit it out on land, but in the meantime a wild boar comes and swallows it. And now the dog attacks the wild boar and tears it in two pieces, and Chanina again finds the ring. The end is entirely different; for instance, when Chanina has brought the bride home to the King he is taken into high favour by