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NOTES.

FAIRY TALE TRANSLATED BY MAIVE STOKES.

WITH NOTES BY MARY STOKES

THE RAT AND THE FROG.

Compare the Bohemian “Long-desired child,” Naake’s Slavonic Fairy Tales, p. 226. This child is carved out of a tree-root by a woodman, who brings him home to his wife. They delight in having a child at last. The child eats all the food in the house; his father and mother; a girl with a wheelbarrow full of clover; a peasant, his hay-laden cart, and his cart-horses; a man and his pigs; a shepherd, his flock and dog; lastly, cabbages belonging to an old woman who cuts him in two with her mattock just as he tries to eat her. Out of him jump unhurt every thing and every one he has swallowed. In a story from the south of Siberia (Gubernatis’ Zoological Mythology, vol. I. p. 140) the hero vanquishes a demon, who tells him that in his stomach he will find a silver casket. He cuts the monster open and out of him come “innumerable animals, men, treasures, and other objects. Some of the men say, ‘What noble youth has delivered us from the black night?'” In two of the caskets the hero finds the eyes of an old woman who has befriended him, and money, “and from the last casket came forth more men, animals, and valuables of every kind.” In a Russian story quoted by Gubernatis ( Zoological Mythology, vol. I. pp. 406, 407) the wolf eats the kids all but one. The mother goat persuades him to jump over a fire. The fire splits his belly open, out tumble all the little kids, lively as ever. There is a very similar story with fox, goat, and kid for actors in Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands, vol. III. p. 93; and Grimm has one also, “Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geislein,” in his Kinder und Hausmaerchen, vol. I. p. 29. In the notes to this story, vol. III. p. 15, Grimm says, “In Pomerania this is told of a child who when his mother had gone out was swallowed by the child-spectre, resembling the varlet Ruprecht. But the stones which he swallows with the child make the spectre so heavy that he falls to the earth, and the child unhurt springs out of him.” See, too, the demons at p. 99 of these stories, who swallow the Princess Champákálí’s suitors.

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Tylor in his Primitive Culture, vol. I. p. 341, classes Little Red Riding Hood among these Day and Night myths. It is, he says, “mutilated in the English Nursery version, but known more perfectly by old wives in Germany, who can tell that the lovely little maid in her shining red satin cloak was swallowed with her grandmother by the wolf, but they both came out safe and sound when the hunter cut open the sleeping beast.” He also quotes among these myths ( ib. p. 338) a story of the Ojibwas in which the hero is swallowed by a great fish and cut out again by his sister; and another belonging to the Basutos in which all mankind save the hero and his mother were devoured by a monster. The hero “attacked the creature and was swallowed whole, but cutting his way out he set free all the inhabitants of the world.” At the same page is the story of the Zulu Princess Untombinde who was carried off by a dreadful beast. “The king gathered his army and attacked it, but it swallowed up men, and dogs, and cattle, all but one warrior; he slew the monster, and there came out cattle, and horses, and men, and last of all the princess herself.” Mr. Tylor quotes, too ( ib. p. 336), in connexion with this class of myths, the story of the death of the New Zealand sun-hero, Maui, which he tells more fully than does Sir George Grey in his Polynesian Mythology; and he goes on at pp. 338, 339, 340, to connect these myths with those of Perseus and Andromeda; Heracles and Hesione; the story of Jonah and his fish; the Greenland angakok swallowed by bear and walrus and thrown up again; and the legend of Hades.