Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/335

 Rh powers; but in the Portuguese tale he is the bridegroom also, though for this purpose we are told he was disenchanted. This allusion to enchantment is a solitary one; and no explanation is offered, nor any account of how he became bewitched. May we not suppose that the enchantment is a late gloss upon the bolder animism that even yet shines through this story? The supposition would be quite reconcileable with a theory, were it broached, that the simplicity of the episode is due to the trituration of ages, and that much, or at least something, has been forgotten. Without pronouncing a definite opinion, I may observe that some colour is lent to such a suggestion by the fact that the parrot-man of The King Andrade is in The Savage King split up into four persons, namely, the Savage King himself, his son, the dove, and her master. In other stories the maiden's protector and his son are identified; and thus three persons take the place of the one in the Brazilian-Portuguese version. None of these persons are really necessary, save the bird and the bridegroom; but they have not been introduced by the peasant story-teller at random. Had that been the case they would scarcely have been found in more than a single variant. Whence, then, have they been derived? In the first place they may constitute the genuine form assumed by the various turns of the plot after having been handed down by tradition during a long period. It would appear, if this be so, that not only, as in The King Andrade, has the original thought been obscured in the course of time: the original cast of the subordinate parts of the story has also gradually been forgotten; and some of the more incredible incidents have been replaced by others making a smaller draft upon the rustic imagination.

Yet it is evident that some reservation must be made as regards the slaughter of the Savage Man in the Sicilian tale of Water and Salt, and its consequence—truly not a small draft on the imagination. But the Savage Man is clearly regarded from the first as a being of a different order; and it may be that the incident is a relic of something completely dropped out of The King Andrade. The history of Sicily and Southern Italy, the home of The Savage King, may suggest another theory. Nothing would seem more likely than the direct importation of Eastern tales into this neighbourhood; and the episode in question