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The king went to his seven wives, and begged them to forgive him. He brought them, his son, and the demon’s daughter home to his palace. Later the king married his son to the demon’s daughter, and every one was glad.

But the king grieved that his six other sons were dead.

Told by Múniyá.

NOTES.

FAIRY TALE TRANSLATED BY MAIVE STOKES.

WITH NOTES BY MARY STOKES

THE DEMON IS AT LAST CONQUERED BY THE KING’S SON.

1. The leading idea of this story is the same as that in “Brave Hírálálbásá.”

2. With this demon as a goat, compare the Rakshas in the Pig’s Head Soothsayer in Sagas from the Far East, p. 63, and the Rakshas in a Bengáli story printed by Mr. G. H. Damant in the Indian Antiquary, 7th June, 1872, p. 120. This last story opens with seven labourers, brothers, six of whom go down to the water to drink and never return. The seventh goes to see what has happened to them, and finds, instead of his brothers, a goat which is really a Rakshas. This goat then turns into a beautiful woman who marries the king, first making him give into her hands the eyes of his queen, who is sent blind into the forest, where she bears a little son. The Rakshas wife learns this, and when the boy later takes service with the king she sends him three times to her people in Ceylon, with orders to them to kill him. He has to bring her foam from the sea, a wonderful rice which is sown, ripens, and can be boiled in one day, and a singular cow. With the help of a Sannyásí (a Bráhman of the fourth order, a religious mendicant), he does these errands safely. The Rakshases in Ceylon receive him as their sister’s son, show him his own mother’s eyes and the clay with which they can be set again in any human sockets, a lemon which contains the life of the tribe, and a bird in which is that of the Rakshas-queen. The boy cuts up the lemon, and thereby kills them all, carries her eyes to his mother, and kills the Rakshas-queen by killing the bird. In this story, as in “Brave Hírálálbásá,” the Rakshas-queen takes her own fearful form on seeing her danger.

3. The Bargat, fig-tree, is the Ficus Bengalensis of Linnæus.

4. Múniyá sends her hero for a Garpank’s feather; Garpank I can find in no dictionary, but have ventured to translate it by eagle, as she says it is like a kite, only very much bigger; she sent us to see a statue of a garpank that stood over a gateway in a street in Calcutta, which might be that of an eagle or of a huge hawk. She said such birds did not exist in Bengal, and that it was not the Garuḍa (the sovran of the feathered race and vehicle of Vishṇu, Benfey). Gubernatis, in the 2nd volume of his Zoological Mythology, p. 189, tells a story from Monferrat where a king is blind, and can only be cured by “bathing his eyes in oil with a feather” of a griffin that lives on a high mountain. His third and youngest son catches and brings him one of the griffins and the king regains his sight.

5. Winning the gratitude of a bird by killing the snake or dragon that year after year devours its young birds is such a common incident in fairy tales, that I will only mention two instances. One occurs in a Dinájpur tale published by Mr. G. H. Damant in the Indian Antiquary for 5th April, 1872, p. 145, where the hero saves the young birds from the snake. They tell the old birds. He lies under the tree and listens to the old birds relating how he will find the tree with the silver stem and golden branches he has come to seek. The other occurs at pp. 119, 110, of a story collected by Vogl ( Volksmaerchen [Slavonic], p. 79) called Schön-Jela. In this tale the hero is sheltered in the dreadful underground wilderness by a hermit. Here there is the gigantic bird, Einja, who every third year has a brood of four young birds which a dragon as regularly devours. The hero, Prince Milan, watches by the nest for the dragon and kills him. The young birds, overjoyed, fly out of the nest and cover the hero with their wings till the old bird on her return asks who has saved them. Then they unfold their wings and she sees Prince Milan. In return she carries him to the upper world.