Page:Grimm's household tales, volume 2 (1884).djvu/411

 forms; it is the written language alone which has only one definite form; the spoken language has often several at one and the same time—for instance, sehde and segde, graut and grot, bede and beide, derde and dride. Teite for father, the old Tatta, is only said in these six villages, elsewhere it is always Vaer. The introduction refers to the following custom. When the children who are tending their cattle on different sides of the mountain want to say anything to each other, one cries, "Hela!" or "Helo! Helo! Hark you!" Then the other answers, "Helo! Helo! What do you want?" "Helo! Helo! just come over here to me!" "Helo! Helo! I'll come directly." On this point compare Steinen's ''Westphäl. Geschichte'', 1. 57. Other versions of the tradition are to be found in Wolf's Hausmärchen, p. 168; in Meier, p. 72; and in Pröhle's Kindermärchen, No. 3.

As a tradition our story corresponds with that in The Thousand and One Nights, of the two sisters who are jealous of their youngest sister (7. 277, and following); only the Arabian story is more amplified and the German simpler, and also move beautiful; both have their own characteristics and thus prove their independence. It would be superfluous to go into particulars, or to make extracts and comparisons from this universally accessible book. The Dervish whose beard and eyebrows the prince cuts off before he speaks (he corresponds with the ghost in German stories, who wishes to be shaved in silence), is here the helpful old woman who is set free and goes away, just as the other dies, after he has fulfilled his destiny. This remarkable story however does not only appear as an Arabian, but also as an old Italian one in Straparola (4, 3); and all derivation from Arabia is decisively prevented by the circumstance that Straparola lived long before the translator of The Thousand and One Nights. Much of it is superior in Straparola. When the children's hair is combed, pearls and precious stones fall out of it, whereby their foster-parents become rich, but in the Arabian, it is only once named that "the tears of the child are reported to have been pearls" (p. 280), the mythic features themselves have already disappeared, and have left only this trace behind. The wondrous things which are demanded in the Italian story, the Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Green Bird, correspond with those required in The Thousand and One Nights, but the former differs and is better conceived in that the guilty persons who threw the children into the water cause the sister to incite her brothers to the perilous enterprise in the hope that they may perish in it. In The Thousand and One Nights, the devotee's motive for exciting the sister's curiosity remains unexplained. On the other hand, the prohibition against looking back occurs needlessly in Straparola, for the punishment of being turned into stone is not attached