Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/71

 and it turns into bamboo sprouts, which naturally check her in her approach (Trans. Asiat. Soc. of Japan, vol. x. p. 36). The Zulu versions will be found in Callaway, pp. 51, 90, 145. In the Russian Tale (Ralston, p. 120), we find that the adventurer is not the brother of the wife of an animal, but the lover of the daughter of the Water King. By her aid he accomplishes the hard tasks set him, and he escapes with her, not by throwing objects behind, but by her magical gift of shape-shifting. The story takes the same form in the old Indian collection of Somadeva (cf. Köhler, Orient und Occident, ii. pp. 107-114. Ralston, pp. 132, 133). The father of the maiden in the Indian version is both animal and giant, a Rakshasa, who can fly about as a crane. In Grimm (51) the girl and her lover flee, by the aid of talking drops of blood, from a cruel witch step-mother. The best German parallel to the incidents of the adventurer's success in love, success in performing the hard tasks, and flight with the girl, is Grimm's "Two Kings' Children" (110). The Scotch version is defective in the details of the flight. (Nicht, Nought, Nothing, collected by the present writer, and published, with notes by Dr. Köhler, in Revue Celtique, vol. iii. 3, 4.)

It is scarcely necessary to show how the incidents which we have been tracing are used in the epic of Jason. He himself is the adventurer; the powerful and malevolent being is the Colchian King Æetes, the daughter of the king, who falls in love with the adventurer, is Medea. Hard tasks, as usual, are set the hero; just as in the Kalewala, Ilmarinen is compelled to plough the adder-close with a plough of gold, to bridle the wolf and the bear of Hades, and to catch the pike that swims in the waters of forgetfulness. The hard tasks in the Highlands and in South Africa may be compared. (Campbell, ii. 328; Callaway, 470). Instead of sowing dragons' teeth, the