Page:The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 01.djvu/27

 2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT

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third clay she stationed herself on the road by which the prince would come, and was gath- ering herbs. The prince asked what this was for. The girl said, " Becanse my father is in the pangs of child-birth, and I am going to spread these herbs under him." " Why," said the prince, " it is not tlie way, that men should bear children." " But if a man can't bear children," answered the girl, " how can an ox have a calf?" The prince was pleased, but said nothing. He went away, and sent his messenger again with three stones in a bag. He would come on the thii'd day, and if the stones were not then made into boots, the old man would lose his head. On the third day the prince came, with all his grandees. The girl was by the roadside, collecting sand in a bag. " What are you going to do with that sand?" asked the prince. "Make thread," said she. " But who ever made thread out of sand ? " " And who ever made boots out of stones ? " she rejoined. The prince laughed in his sleeve, prepared a great wedding, and married the girl to his son. Soon after, an- other prince wrote him a letter, saying, " Do rot let us be fighting and killing, but let us guess riddles. If you guess all mine, I will be your subject ; if you fail, I will take all your having." They were a whole year at the riddles. The other prince " knew three words more," and threw ours into a deep dun- geon. From the depths of this dungeon he contrived to send a profoundly enigmatic dis- patch to his daughter-in-law, who understood everything, disguised herself as one of his friends, and proposed to the victor to guess riddles again. The clever daughter-in-law

"knew seven words more" than he, took her father-in-law out of the dungeon, threw his rival in, and had all the people and property of the vanquished prince for her own. .

This Siberian tale links securely those which precede it with a remarkable group of stories, covering by repi'esentatives still extant, or which may be shown to have existed, a large part of Asia and of Europe. This group in- cludes, besides a Wallachian and a Mag3^ar tale from recent popular tradition, one Sanskrit forms tAvo Tibetan, dei'ived from Sanskrit; one Mongol, from Tibetan ; three Arabic and one Persian, which also had their source in Sanskrit ; two Middle-Greek, derived from Arabic, one of which is lost ; and two old Rus- sian, from lost Middle-Greek versions.*

The gist of these narratives is that one king propounds tasks to another ; in the earlier ones, with the intent to discover whether his brother monarch enjoys the aid of such counsellors as will make an attack on him dangerous ; in the later, with a demand that he shall acquit himself satisfactorily, or suffer a forfeit: and the king is delivered from a serious strait by the sagacity either of a minister (whom he had ordered to be put to death, but who was still living in prison, or at least seclusion) or of the daughter of his minister, who came to her father's assistance. Which is the prior of these two last inventions it would not be easy to say. These tasks are always such as re- quire ingenuity of one kind or another, whether in devising practical experiments, in contriv- ing subterfuges, in solving riddles, or even in constructing compliments. f

One of the Tibetan tales, which, though

ferred to are: Shukasaptati (Seventy Tales of a Parrot), 47th and 48th night ; the Buddhist Kanjur, Vinaya, iii, fol. 71-83, and Dsanglun, oder derWeise u. der Thor, also from the Kanjur, translated by I. J. Schmidt, c. 23 ; the Mongol translation of Dsanglun [see Popow, Mongolische Chres- tomathie, p. 19, Schiefner's preface to Radloff, i, xi, xii] ; an imperfect Singhalese version in Spence Hardy's Manual of Buddhism, p. 220, ' The History of Wisakha;"'Geschichte des weisen Heykar,' 1001 Nacht, Habicht, v. d. Hagen u. Schall, XIII, 71, ed. 1840; ' Histoire de Sinkarib at de ses deux Visirs,' Cabinet des Fe'es, xxxix, 266 (Persian) ; two old Russian translations of Greek tales derived from Arabic, Pypin, ' in the Papers of the Second Division of the Im-
 * Benfey, Das Ausland, 1859, p. 459. The versions re-

perial Acad, of Sciences, St Petersburg, 1858, iv, 63-85;' Planudes, Life of iEsop ; A. and A. Schott, Walachische Maihrchen, p. 125, No 9, ' Vom weissen und vom rothen Kaiser; ' Erde'lyi, Ne'pdalok e's Mondak, in, 262, No 8, ' The Little Boy vfhh the Secret and his Little Sword.' To these is to be added, ' L'Histoire de Moradbak,' Caylus, Nouveaux Contes Orientaux, CEuvres Badines, vii, 289 ff. Cabinet des Fe'es, XXV, 9-406 (from the Turkish ?). In the opinion of Benfey, it is in the highest degree likely, though not demon- strable, that the Indian tale antedates our era by several centuries. Ausland, p. 511 ; see also pp. 487, 459.

t Ingenuity is one of the six transcendental virtues of Mahavana Buddhism. Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet, p. 36.