Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/179

Rh from the Tamil must be to give another and telling blow to the theory of our European popular tales being the exclusive property of the Aryan race. They also serve to show, as it seems to us, the marked influence of the Tamils on the Buddhist literature of Ceylon, and, in fact, suggest new questions as to the origin and diffusion of tales and apologues current throughout the whole of the Indian peninsula.

Like nearly all Asiatic story-books, the Dravidian Nights, as the learned translator happily entitles the English rendering of the Tamil romance Madana Káma Rájá Kadai, consists of a general, or leading story, within which are sphered or interwoven a series of tales, more or less appropriate to the circumstances which led to their narration. The frame-story is thus outlined by the translator in his preface: "Madanakamárájá, the prince of the Mahéndrapuri, falls in love with two female figures represented in a picture. His minister goes in search of them, finds them out after a great deal of difficulty, and succeeds in getting them apparently wedded to himself. The ladies approach, each in her turn, the side of their lord, to give him their company. But as he has meant one of them to be the wife of his master the prince, and as he himself must choose his wife only after the prince has chosen his, he keeps them off by relating fine stories, of the adventures, half probable, half improbable, of some great prince or other hero. By concluding each story with the question, 'And must not such a youth marry you, my gem of womankind?' he prepares them to accept their future lord." And here it may be mentioned, as another of the innumerable parallels of the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, that the prince had become an exile from his father's court and kingdom in consequence of the daughter of the king's domestic chaplain having fallen in love with him, and on her proffered love being rejected, in revenge accused him to his father of having attempted to violate her chastity, upon which the king ordered his son to be put to death; but the executioners, believing him to be innocent, killed a beast in his stead and showed its blood as that of his son; and the prince accompanied by his faithful friend, the son of the king's chief minister, set out for another country.

The stories related by the minister's son to his supposed wives alternately are twelve in number, abound in most interesting adventures,