Chapter XX: Inside Again

This story is one of the most interesting in the study of the popular diffusion of tales, and I therefore give it here though I have given an excellent version from Temple and Steel in _Indian Fairy Tales_, ix., "The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal," and have there discussed the original form. Its interest, from the point of view of diffusion, lies in the fact that it occurs in India, both early (see Benfey, i., 117) and late (Temple, 12, Frere, 14), in Greece, both classical (AEsopic fable of the serpent in the bosom) and modern (Hahn, 87, Schmidt, p. 3), and in the earliest mediaeval collection of popular tales by Petrus Alfonsi (_Disciplina clericalis_, vii.), as well as in the Reynard cycle. Besides these quasi-literary sources ranging over more than two thousand years, there are innumerable folk-versions collected in the last century and ranging from Burmah (Semeaton, _The Karens_, 128) to America (Harris, _Uncle Remus_, 86). These are all enumerated by Professor Krohn in an elaborate dissertation, "Mann und Fuchs" (Helsingfors, 1891). In essentials the trick by which the fisherman gets the djin inside the bottle again, in the first story within the frame of the _Arabian Nights_ (adapted so admirably by Mr. Anstey in his _Brass Bottle_), is practically the same device. Richard I. is said, by Matthew Paris (ed. Luard, ii., 413-16), to have told the nobles of England, after his return from captivity in the East, a similar apologue proving the innate ingratitude of man. This is derived from the Karma Jataka, which was possibly the ultimate source of the whole series of tales.

Amid all these hundred variants there is one common idea, that of the ingratitude of a rescued animal (crocodile, snake, tiger, etc.), which is thwarted by its being placed back in the situation from which it was rescued. In some cases the bystander who restores equilibrium is alone; in most instances there are three of them; the first two having suffered from man's ingratitude see no reason for interfering. This is the "common form" which I have adopted in my version. In India the sufferer from ingratitude is sometimes a tree (a mulberry tree, in _Indian Fairy Tales_), but the European versions prefer horses or dogs.

Now it is obvious that such an artificial apologue on man's ingratitude could not have been invented twice for that particular purpose; and thus the hundred different versions (to which Dr. Bolte could probably add another century) must all, in the last resort, have emanated from a single source. When and where that original was concocted is one of the most interesting problems of folk-tale diffusion; the moralizing tendency of the tale, the animistic note underlying it, all point to India, where we find it in the Bidpai literature before the Christian era and current among the folk at the present day. The case for Indian origin is strongest for drolls of this kind.

I may add that the ingratitude of the man towards the fox at the end is not so universal a tail piece to the story as the rest of it, and is ultimately derived from the Reynard cycle, in which I have also introduced it (see "Bruin and Reynard").

But it occurs in many of the variants and comes in so appropriately that I thought it desirable to add it also here. The substitution of a dog for something else desired also occurs in the story of the Hobyahs in _More English Fairy Tales_, where Mr. Batten's released dog is so fierce (p. 125) that it drives one of the Hobyahs over on to the next page belonging to altogether another story.