Chapter V: Introduction: Distribution of Gypsies (4)

1. The Son of Seven = The Bad Mother (No. = The Blue Belt
Mothers, etc. 8), etc. (Norse), etc.
2. The Boy with the Moon = It all comes to Light = Grimm’s Three Little
on his Forehead, etc. (No. 17), etc. Birds, etc.
3. Prince Lionheart, = Mare’s Son (No. 20), = Grimm’s Strong Hans,
etc. etc. etc.
4. Valiant Vicky, the = The Deluded Dragon = Grimm’s Valiant
Brave Weaver, etc. (No. 21), etc. Little Tailor, etc.
5. The Two Brothers, = The Hen that laid = Grimm’s Two Brothers,
etc. Diamonds (No. 25). etc.
6. The Weaver as Vishnu = The Winged Hero (No. = Andersen’s Flying
(Sansk.). 26). Trunk, etc.
7. The Two Bhûts, etc. = The Rich and the Poor = Grimm’s Two
Brother (No. 30), Travellers, etc.
etc.
8. Story cited by = The Witch (No. 50), = Cosquin’s Chatte
Ralston. etc. Blanche, etc.

There is also a frequent identity of incident in Gypsy and Indian folk-tales. Thus, in the Hungarian-Gypsy version of ‘The Vampire’ (No. 5), the king sends his coachman to pluck the flower that has grown from the maiden’s grave; the coachman cannot, but the king himself can, and takes the flower home. Just so the Bel-Princess, thrown into a well, turns into a lotus-flower, which recedes from the villager who tries to pluck it, but floats into the prince’s hand (Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, p. 145; also p. 10). Fruits causing pregnancy are common in Gypsy as in Indian folk-tales (cf. Notes to No. 16); and God sends St. Peter with them in the former just as Mahádeo does an old fakír in the latter. The sleeping beauty in ‘The Winged Hero’ (No. 26) lies lifeless on the bed, and is awakened only by the removal of the candle from her head; in ‘The Boy with the Moon on his Forehead’ (Lal Behari Day’s Folk-tales of Bengal, p. 251) it is two little sticks of gold and silver that revive the suspended animation of the young lady sleeping on the golden bedstead. The rescue of the eaglets from the dragon in ‘Mare’s Son’ (No. 20) exactly matches the rescue of the two birds from the huge serpent in the Bengal ‘Story of Prince Sobur’ (p. 134); and the princess in the tree in that same Bengal story (p. 126) comes very near the wife in the oak in the Polish-Gypsy ‘Tale of a Girl who was sold to the Devil’ (No. 46). The robbers in a Moravian-Gypsy story (No. 43) break through the wall of a castle like the robbers of Scripture and of Indian folk-tales; and one very curious feature, which we can trace across two continents, is the feather, hair, or wing of a bird, beast, or insect, the burning of which, or sometimes the mere thinking on which, summons its former possessor to the hero’s aid. It occurs in this passage from an unpublished Turkish-Gypsy story (Paspati, p. 523):—‘He gave the old man a feather, and he said to the old man, “Take it and carry it to your daughter, and if she puts it in the fire I will come.”’ It occurs, too, in the Roumanian-Gypsy story of ‘The Three Princesses and the Unclean Spirit’ (No. 10), in the Bukowina-Gypsy story of ‘The Enchanted City’ (No. 32), and in the Polish-Gypsy ‘Tale of a Girl who was sold to the Devil’ (No. 46). It is by no means a common feature in Western folklore, but it occurs in Basile’s Pentamerone, iv. 3, and in the Irish story of ‘The Weaver’s Son and the Giant of the White Hill’ (Curtin, pp. 64–77) the hero gets a bit of wool from the ram, a bit of fin from the salmon, and a feather from the eagle, with injunctions to take them out when in any difficulty, and so summon all the rams, salmon, or eagles of the world to his assistance. As I show in the notes to No. 46, the idea is of frequent occurrence in the folk-tales of the Levant [28] and of India. In Mrs. Steel’s Wide-awake Stories, p. 32, the demon says to the Faithful Prince, ‘Take this hair with you, and, when you need help, burn it, then I will come immediately to your assistance.’ And in the Arabian Nights (‘Conclusion of the Story of the Ladies of Baghdad’) the Jinneeyeh gives the first lady a lock of her hair, and says, ‘When thou desirest my presence, burn a few of these hairs, and I will be with thee quickly, though I should be beyond Mount Kaf.’

The list, I expect, of identical plots and incidents could be largely extended even from my collection by M. Cosquin or any one else well versed in Indian folklore. Yet, as it stands, that list goes some way to corroborate my theory. One obvious objection may be anticipated. A folk-tale, as told to-day in India, need not be more primitive, more faithful to the original, than the same folk-tale as told to-day in Greece or Germany. The same wear and tear may have affected the story that stayed at home as has affected the story that wandered westward a thousand or two thousand years ago; it may have affected it in a very much greater degree. That is just what we find in language; the Rómani vast, hand, comes much nearer the Sanskrit hasta than does the Hindustani hāth. Another point may also be illustrated from language. The same word, or two kindred words, may have reached the same destination by different routes and at widely different periods. The Gypsies brought with them páni, water, to England, whither centuries after came the ‘brandy-pawnee’ of Anglo-Indians; páni is a far-away cousin of ae, aqueous, aquarium, etc. Brother and fraternal, [29] foot and pedestrian, are two out of hundreds of similar instances. In much the same way, it need not be any positive objection to the late transmission of a folk-tale to Norway or England, that an earlier form of that folk-tale already existed there. Because in the Nibelungenlied one finds a striking parallel to an episode in the Bukowina-Gypsy story of ‘The Prince, his Comrade, and Nastasa the Fair’ (No. 24), it does not follow that that story is necessarily derived from the Nibelungenlied. Still, the difficulty of discriminating between the earlier and the more recent forms of a folk-tale must be enormous—it may be, insuperable.

Tokens of Recent Diffusion.

Sometimes, however, it seems to me, we get sure tokens of recent diffusion. Thus in the folk-tales to which Sir George Cox, Professor de Gubernatis, and their fellow-mythologists assign a prehistoric antiquity, one of the commonest incidents is where the hero and heroine, flying from a demon, magician, or ogre (the heroine’s father often), transform themselves into a church and priest. We find the incident in Lorraine, Brittany, Picardy, many parts of both Germany and Italy, the Tyrol, Transylvania, Hungary, Croatia, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, as well as among the Gypsies of Turkey, the Bukowina, and Galicia (cf. Cosquin, i. 106; and my own pp. 127, 196). What was the prehistoric form of the church? Was it a tope, a stone circle, something of the kind? That well may be. But how comes it that the development of the prehistoric form has in all these widely-separated countries reached exactly the same stage, and there stopped? Why has not the stone circle become in one case a stone-heap with a stone-breaker, in another a pound with a horse in it, in a third a field with a rubbing-post? Why always the modern Christian notion of a church? But the difficulty vanishes if one may suppose that the Gypsies, starting from the Balkan Peninsula at a date when churches were familiar objects, which a pursuer would naturally pass, carried with them the modern version of the story to Russia, Spain, and the other countries in which it is told to-day. Similarly, in Gypsy stories, and in stories current in countries wide apart, one finds such incidents as the hero falling in love through a portrait, the hero playing cards with the devil, the hero carrying a Bellerophon letter, the hero looking through an all-seeing telescope. Such stories in their original form may be of indefinable antiquity; but the recurrence of their developed form amongst Slavs and Teutons and Celts would seem to be due to recent transmission, unless one is prepared to maintain that our primæval Aryan ancestors were acquainted with portrait-painting, with playing-cards, with the art of writing, and with telescopes.

The Anthropological Theory.

In his Introduction to Mrs. Hunt’s admirable translation of Grimm, Mr. Andrew Lang thus expounded his ‘Anthropological’ theory of folk-tales:—

‘As to the origin of the wild incidents in Household Tales, let any
one ask himself this question: Is there anything in the frequent
appearance of cannibals, in kinship with animals, in magic, in
abominable cruelty, that would seem unnatural to a savage?
Certainly not; all these things are familiar to his world. Do all
these things occur on almost every page of Grimm? Certainly they
do. Have they been natural and familiar incidents to the educated
German mind during the historic age? No one will venture to say so.
These notions, then, have survived in peasant tales from the time
when the ancestors of the Germans were like Zulus or Maoris or
Australians.’

Gypsy Savagery.

It is an interesting, the most interesting theory; still I cannot forbear pointing out that many of Mr. Lang’s survivals of dead Teutonic savagery are living realities in Gypsy tents. Matty Cooper, discoursing to his ‘dear little wooden bear,’ and offering it beer to drink; ‘Gypsy Mary,’ who ‘washed herself away from God Almighty’; Riley Smith and Emily Pinfold, who both ‘sold their blood to the Devil’; Mrs. Draper, who vowed that, sooner than touch beer or spirits, she would go to Loughton churchyard, and drink the blood of her dead son lying there; Riley Bosville with his two wives, and old Charles Pinfold with his three; Lementina Lovell, who heard the fairy music; her grandson, Dimiti, who lay awake once in Snaky Lane, and watched the little fairies in the oak-tree; and Ernest Smith (1871–98), who one July night in the grounds of the Edinburgh Electrical Exhibition of 1890 saw ‘two dear little teeny people, about two feet high, and he upp’d and flung stones at ’em’—I myself have known eight of these Gypsies, and kinsfolk of the two others. It is not sixteen years since an English Gypsy girl, to work her vengeance on her false Gentile lover, cut the heart out of a living white pigeon, and flung the poor bird, yet struggling, on the fire. It is barely fifty years since old Mrs. Smith was buried at Troston, near Ixworth, after travelling East Anglia for half a century with a sparrow, which, like the raven in Grimm’s story, told her all manner of secrets. (Cf. Mr. Lang’s ‘4. Savage idea.—Animals help favoured men and women.’) Then, there is the Gypsy system of tabu, by which wife and child renounce for ever the favourite food or drink of the dead husband or father, or the name of the deceased is dropped clean out of use, any survivors who happen to bear it adopting another. There is the belief in the evil eye; there are caste-like rules of ceremonial purity; and on the Continent there is, or was lately, actual idolatry—tree-worship among German Gypsies, and the worship of the moon-god, Alako, among their brethren of Scandinavia. [Cannibalism.] Nor even for cannibalism need Mr. Lang go far back or far afield. In 1782 in Hungary, next door to Germany, forty-five Gypsies, men and women, were beheaded, broken on the wheel, quartered alive, or hanged, for cannibalism. Arrested first by way of wise precaution, they were racked till they confessed to theft and murder, then were brought to the spot where they said their victims should be buried, and, no victims forthcoming, were promptly racked again. ‘We ate them,’ at last was their despairing cry, and straightway the Gypsies were hurried to the scaffold; straightway the newspapers all over Europe rang with blood-curdling narratives of ‘Gypsy cannibalism.’ Then, when it all was over, the Emperor Joseph sent a commission down, the outcome of whose investigations was that nobody was missing, that no one had been murdered—but the Gypsies. That was in Hungary, a century ago; but even in England, in 1859, a judge seems to have entertained a similar suspicion. In that year, at the York assizes, a Gypsy lad, Guilliers Heron, was tried for a robbery, of which, by the bye, he was innocent. ‘One of the prisoner’s brothers’ (I quote from the Times of Thursday, 10th March, p. 11), ‘said they were all at tea with the prisoner at five o’clock in their tent, and, when asked what they had to eat, he said they had a “hodgun” cooked, which is the provincial name for a hedgehog. His Lordship (Mr. Justice Byles): “What do you say you had—cooked urchin?” Gypsy: “Yes, cooked hodgun. I’m very fond of cooked hodgun” (with a grin). His Lordship’s mind seemed to be filled with horrible misgivings, when the meaning of the provincialism was explained amid much laughter.’ Cannibalism is a common feature of Gypsy folk-tales, as this collection will show; but it is far commoner, and on a far grander scale, in the folk-tales of India, where a rakshasi makes nothing of polishing off the entire population of a city, plus the goats and sheep, horses and elephants. How does Mr. Lang account for this, for Germany remained savage long ages after India? I rather fancy, though I cannot be certain, that cannibalism in folk-tales tapers off pretty regularly westward from India. [30]

Gypsy Migrations.

In the Academy for 11th June 1887 Mr. Lang objected: ‘Can M. Cosquin show that South Siberia and Zanzibar got their contes by oral transmission from India within the historical period? This is doubtful; but it seems still more unlikely that tales which originated in India could have reached Barra and Uist in the Hebrides, and Zululand, and the Samoyeds—not to mention America—by oral transmission, and all within the historical period.’ My pp. xv–xviii and xxxv–xlv furnish a fairly good answer to much of this objection, for they show that during the last three centuries recent immigrants from India, possessed of folk-tales, have been passing to and fro between Lorraine and Italy, Scotland and North America, Portugal and Africa and Brazil, Poland and Siberia, Spain and Louisiana, the Basque Country and Africa, Hungary and Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, and Algeria, the Balkan Peninsula and Scandinavia, Italy and Asia Minor, Corfu and Corsica, the Levant and Liverpool, Hungary and Scotland. But, indeed, Mr. Lang’s objection was, in part at least, answered already, by the discovery in Scandinavia, Orkney, and Lancashire of thousands of Cufic coins of the ninth and tenth centuries. For where coins could journey from Bagdad, so also of course could folk-tales.

I remember once in an English parsonage being shown a ‘cannibal fork.’ I do not think I rushed to the conclusion that the parson’s grandmother had been a ghoul; no, I rather fancy there was talk of a son or a brother who was a missionary somewhere, perhaps in the South Sea Islands. And I remember also how a Suffolk vicar unearthed a Romano-British cemetery. One of his most treasured finds was a pair of brass compasses: ‘Marvellous,’ he would point out, ‘how like they are to our own.’ ‘As well they may be,’ old Mrs. C—— remarked to me (she was the daughter of a former vicar), ‘for I can quite well remember my poor brother John losing them.’

Gypsy Originality.

Sometimes, I scarce know why, the eloquence and the ingenuity of folklorists suggest these reminiscences; anyhow, I doubt if to folklorists my theory is likely to commend itself. From solar myths, savage philosophy, archæan survivals, polyonymy, relics of Druidism, polygamous frameworks, and such-like high-sounding themes, it is a terrible come-down to Gypsies=gipsies=tramps. [31] So I look for most folklorists to scout my theory, and to maintain that the Turkish Gypsies picked up their folk-tales from Turks or Greeks, the Roumanian Gypsies theirs from Roumans, the Hungarian Gypsies theirs from Magyars, the English and Welsh Gypsies theirs from the English and Welsh, the —— Hold! hold! pray where are the English or Welsh originals of our Gypsy versions of ‘The Master Thief,’ ‘The Little Peasant,’ ‘Frederick and Catherine,’ ‘Ferdinand the Faithful,’ ‘The Master Smith,’ ‘The Robber Bridegroom,’ or ‘Strong Hans’? where those of such English and Welsh Gypsy stories as ‘The Black Dog of the Wild Forest,’ ‘De Little Bull-calf,’ ‘Jack and his Golden Snuff-box,’ or ‘An Old King and his Three Sons in England’? It may be answered that the last three are in Mr. Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales (2 vols. 1890–94). I know those stories are there; they form nearly ten per cent. of Mr. Jacobs’ entire collection; but have they any business to be there? I have John Roberts’ manuscript of ‘An Old King’ before me now; it opens—‘Adoi ses yecker porro koreelish, ta ses les trin chavay.’ You may render that, as I rendered it, into English, ‘There was once an old king, and he had three sons’; but that does not make the story an English one. No; so far as our present information goes, ‘An Old King’ is a Welsh-Gypsy folk-tale. [32]

There is at least one other story in Mr. Jacobs’ collection that may be Gypsy, not English. This is ‘The Three Feathers,’ which, Mrs. Gomme tells me, was collected from some Deptford hop-pickers by a lady now in America. Not all hop-pickers are Gypsies, but a goodly proportion are, as I know from old walks among Kentish and Surrey hop-gardens. ‘The Three Feathers’ is a variant of Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian story of ‘Feledico and Epomata’ (No. 55, i. 251), of an incident in Campbell’s Gaelic story of ‘The Battle of the Birds’ (No. 2, i. 36, 50), of one in Kennedy’s Irish story of ‘The Brown Bear of Norway’ (p. 63), and of one in the Norse story of ‘The Master-maid.’

Gaelic and Welsh-Gypsy Stories.

Now, of ‘The Battle of the Birds’ we have a Welsh-Gypsy version, ‘The Green Man of Noman’s Land’ (No. 62), lacking, it is true, this episode, which may be an interpolation in the Gaelic story, but unmistakably identical with the Gaelic story, of which, however, it forms only a fragment. In the Gaelic version the hero is set four tasks by the heroine’s father, in the Gypsy version five tasks, as follows:—

GAELIC. WELSH-GYPSY.

To cleanse a byre, uncleansed To clean a stable. Heroine does it. for seven years. Heroine does Father accuses him of receiving it. Father taxes him with having help. He denies it. been helped. Wanting. To fell a forest before mid-day (cf. Polish-Gypsy story of ‘The Witch,’ p. 188). Heroine does it. Same denial. To thatch byre with birds’ To thatch barn with one feather only down—birds with no two feathers of each bird. Heroine does it. of one colour. Heroine does it. He denies help. To climb a very lofty fir-tree To climb glass mountain in middle of beside a loch, and fetch down lake, and fetch egg of bird that magpie’s five eggs. He climbs it lays one only. He wishes heroine’s on a ladder of heroine’s shoe a boat, and they reach fingers, but in his haste her mountain. He wishes her finger a little finger is left on top of ladder, but steps over the last tree. rung, and her finger is broken. She warns him to deny help. To select at the dance the To guess which of the three youngest of the three sisters daughters is which, as they fly all dressed alike. He knows her three times over castle in form of by the absence of the little birds. Forewarned by heroine, he finger. names them correctly.

The story, of course, is a very widespread one. We have a Sanskrit version of it on the one hand, and on the other an African Negro version from Jamaica, with many more referred to in the notes on two other Gypsy versions—one from the Bukowina, ‘Made over to the Devil’ (No. 34), and the other from Galicia, ‘The Witch’ (No. 50). But in the Gaelic and in the Gypsy version there are two special points to be noted. The first is that the almost absolute identity of the tasks imposed seems to preclude the idea that the likeness between the two versions can be explained by their being derived from a common original, three or four thousand years old. The second point is that in some respects the Gypsy version is decidedly the better of the two: the fir-tree beside a loch cannot compare with the glass mountain in the middle of the lake; and the selection of the youngest daughter at the dance is inferior to the selection of her as she flies in bird-shape over the castle.

Other Parallels.

Resemblances only less strongly marked are observable between Campbell’s two stories of ‘The Shifty Lad’ and ‘The Three Widows’ and the Welsh-Gypsy story of ‘Jack the Robber’ (No. 68), between his ‘Tale of the Soldier’ (given here as a tinker story, No. 74), and my ‘Ashypelt’ (No. 57), and between his ‘Brown Bear of the Green Glen’ (No. 73 here) and my ‘Old King his Three Sons’ (No. 55). There is also sometimes a striking similarity of phrase and idea in Gaelic and Welsh-Gypsy stories. Thus, in Campbell we get: ‘The dun steed would catch the swift March wind that would be before, and the swift March wind could not catch her’; ‘He went much further than I can tell or you can think’; and ‘Whether dost thou like the big half of the bannock and my curse, or the little half and my blessing?’ For which John Roberts gives: ‘Off he went as fast as the wind, which the wind behind could not catch the wind before’; ‘Now poor Jack goes ... further than I can tell you to-night or ever intend to tell you’; and ‘Which would you like best for me to make you—a little cake and to bless you, or a big cake and to curse you?’ This last feature—of the big cake and curse, or the little cake and blessing—is found, to the best of my knowledge, in no folk-tale outside the British Isles; but it occurs also in the Aberdeenshire story of ‘The Red Etin’ (Chambers’s Popular Rhymes of Scotland, p. 90), and in Kennedy’s ‘Jack and his Comrades’ and ‘The Corpse-Watchers’ (Fictions of the Irish Celts, pp. 5, 54).

Irish and Gypsy Folk-tales.

It is hard to conceive how stories told by Welsh Gypsies should have been derived from West Highland folk-tales; of the alternative notion that the West Highland folk-tales may have originally been derived from Gypsies we get one pretty strong confirmation—the identity of Campbell’s ‘Knight of Riddles’ (No. 22) and the Turkish-Gypsy story of ‘The Riddle’ (No. 3). Reinhold Köhler, in Orient und Occident, ii. 320, failed to find in all Europe’s folklore any parallel to the latter, the essential, half of the Gaelic story; but the knight’s daughter’s plaid there is clearly the Highland version of the princess’s chemise in the Gypsy story. Campbell, too, is sore put to it how the Rhampsinitus story can have found its way to Dumbartonshire (i. 352), or a tale from Boccaccio to Islay (ii. 14), or one from Straparola to Barra (ii. 238). But all three stories are known to the Gypsies; there, then, is a solution of Campbell’s perplexities. So that if Campbell’s stories and the Welsh-Gypsy stories had stood alone, I should, I believe, have urged that alternative notion. But they do not, for in several cases the Welsh-Gypsy stories resemble Irish Gaelic versions a great deal more closely than they do the Scottish ones. Thus, in Mr. Curtin’s Myths and Folklore of Ireland [33] (1890) is ‘The Son of the King of Erin and the Giant of Loch Lein,’ pp. 32–49, a variant of Campbell’s ‘Battle of the Birds’; the following brief abstract of it will show how exactly it tallies with our ‘Green Man of Noman’s Land’ (No. 62):—Prince plays cards with giant, and wins two estates. Plays again, and wins golden-horned cattle. Plays again, and loses his head, so has to give himself up to giant in a year and a day. On his way to giant’s he lodges with three old women, sisters, each of whom gives him a ball of thread for guide. Near the giant’s castle he comes on a lake, in which giant’s three daughters are bathing. He seizes the clothes of the youngest one, and to get them back she promises to save him from danger. The giant sets him tasks—to clean stable, to thatch stable with birds’ feathers (no two alike), and to bring down crow’s one egg from a tree covered with glass, nine hundred feet high. The youngest daughter helps him in all three tasks, for the third task making him strip the flesh from her bones, and use the bones as steps for climbing. Coming down, he misses the last bone, and she loses her little toe. The prince goes home, and is to be married to the daughter of the King of Lochlin [Denmark], but the giant and his daughter are invited to the wedding. Then, as in Campbell’s tale, the giant’s daughter ‘threw two grains of wheat in the air, and there came down on the table two pigeons. The cock pigeon pecked at the hen and pushed her off the table. Then the hen called out to him in a human voice, “You wouldn’t do that to me the day I cleaned the stable for you.”’ So, too, the hen reminds the cock of the second and third tasks [34]; and, awakened at last to remembrance, the prince weds the giant’s daughter.

Clearly, the readiest explanation of the likeness between ‘The Green Man of Noman’s Land’ and the Scottish and Irish stories would be that these last are both derived from Gypsies; but then of Gypsies in Ireland our knowledge is almost nil. In a letter of 8th February 1898, Mr. William Larminie, of Bray, Co. Wicklow, the author of West Irish Folk-tales (1893), writes:—‘I have never heard of Irish Gypsies proper. They seem never to have settled in the country for some reason.’ On the other hand, three or four English-Gypsy families of my acquaintance have certainly travelled Ireland during the last thirty years; Simson’s History of the Gipsies (1865) contains allusions on pp. 325–8, 356–8, etc., to visits of ‘Irish Gipsies’ to Scotland; and, according to a note by Mr. Ffrench of Donegal in the Gypsy Lore Journal for April 1890, p. 127, ‘there are two tribes of Gypsy-folk in Ireland. The first are real Gypsies; the second are what are called “Gilly Goolies,” and are only touched on the Gypsies, i.e. have a strain of Gypsy blood in their veins, and follow the mode of life followed by the Gypsies.’ Moreover, the Irish novelist, William Carleton (1794–1869), in his Autobiography (1896), i. 212, shows that ‘Scottish gipsies’ did visit mid-Ireland about 1814 and earlier. ‘My eldest married sister, Mary,’ he writes, ‘lived (about the period when I, having been set apart for the Church, commenced my Latin) in the townland of a place called Ballagh, Co. Roscommon, remarkable for the beauty of its lough. It was during the Easter holidays, and I was on a visit to her. At that time it was not unusual for a small encampment of the Scottish gipsies to pass over to the north of Ireland, and indeed I am not surprised at it, considering the extraordinary curiosity, not to say enthusiasm, with which they were received by the people. The men were all tinkers, and the women thieves and fortune-tellers—but in their case the thief was always sunk in the fortune-teller.’ And he goes on to describe how he had his own fortune told with a pack of cards by one of the women, ‘a sallow old pythoness.’

One may not build upon so slight a superstructure, though at the same time it should be borne in mind that nothing, absolutely nothing, was known of the Welsh Gypsies till 1875. Where, however, as in England, Gypsies have certainly been roaming to and fro for centuries, nothing seems to me likelier than the transmission by them of folk-tales. For I know by frequent journeyings with them how the Gypsy camp is the favourite nightly rendezvous of the lads and lasses from the neighbouring village. All the amusement they can give their guests, the Gypsies give gladly; and stories and songs are among their best stock-in-trade.

Gypsy Story-tellers.

Campbell of Islay has shown us a Gypsy professional story-teller in London, and Paspati has shown us a Gypsy professional story-teller, the grandson of one at Constantinople. That is not much, perhaps; but there are several more indications of the transmission of folk-tales by Gypsies. Bakht, the Rómani word for ‘luck’ or ‘fortune,’ has passed, not merely into Albanian folk-tales, but into the Greek and Turkish languages, as I show in a footnote on p. 53; and a good many of the following seventy-six stories seem to show unmistakable tokens of the practised raconteur’s art. ‘Let us leave the dogs, and return to the girl,’ in No. 47; ‘Now we’ll leave the master to stand a bit, and go back to the mother,’ in No. 68; ‘And I came away, told the story,’ in Nos. 6, 7, 8, and 15; ‘And I left them there, and came and told my story to your lordships,’ in No. 10; ‘I was there, and heard everything that happened,’ in No. 12; ‘Away I came, the tale have told,’ in No. 18; ‘Now you’ve got it,’ in No. 28; ‘If they are not dead, they are still alive,’ in Nos. 41 and 42, and also in Hungarian-Gypsy stories; ‘The floor there was made of paper, and I came away here,’ in No. 43; ‘So if they are not dead, they are living together,’ in No. 44; ‘Excuse me for saying it,’ in No. 55; ‘She was delivered (pray, excuse me) of a boy,’ in No. 46; ‘And the last time I was there I played my harp for them, and got to go again,’ in No. 54—these all sound like tags or formulas of the professional story-teller. Léon Zafiri’s usual wind-up, says Paspati (p. 421), ran: ‘And I too, I was there, and I ate, and I drank, and I have come to tell you the story.’

Story-telling a living Gypsy art.

A tree can never be quite dead as long as it puts forth shoots; I fancy the very latest shoot in the whole Yggdrasil of European folk-tales is the episode in ‘The Tinker and his Wife’ (No. 70), where the tinker buys a barrel of beer, and says, ‘Now, my wench, you make the biggest penny out of it as ever you can,’ and she goes and sells the whole barrel to a packman for one of the old big pennies. That episode cannot be earlier than the introduction of the new bronze coinage in 1861; it looks as though it must itself be a recent coinage of Cornelius Price, or of Nebuchadnēzar, his uncle. But, there, I have known a Gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale impromptu. She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand, with ‘a lot o’ real tip-top gentry’; and ‘Reía,’ she said to me afterwards, ‘I’ll tell you the comicalest thing as ever was. We’d pulled up, to put the brake on; and there was a púro hotchiwítchi (old hedgehog) come and looked at us through the hedge, looked at me hard. I could see he’d his eye upon me. And home he’d go, that old hedgehog, to his wife, and “Missus,” he’d say, “what d’ ye think? I seen a little Gypsy gal just now in a coach and four hosses”; and “Dábla!” she’d say, “sawkúmni ’as vardé kenáw”’ (Bless us! every one now keeps a carriage).

Possible Gypsy influences.

I have told English Gypsies Grimm’s tale of ‘The Hare and the Hedgehog,’ and they always pronounce that it must be a Rómani story (‘Who else would have gone for to make up a tale about hedgehogs?’) [35] But the question whether in many non-Gypsy collections there are not a number of folk-tales that present strong internal evidence of their Gypsy origin is a difficult question; it would take us too far afield, and could lead to no really definite results. Still, I must say a word or two. In Hahn’s fine variant (ii. 267) of our ‘Mare’s Son’ from the island of Syra a vizier travels from town to town, seeking a lad as handsome as the prince. At last he is passing through a Gypsy quarter, [36] when he hears a boy singing: ‘his voice was beautiful as any nightingale’s.’ He looks through a door, and sees a boy, who is every whit as handsome as the prince, so he purchases this boy, and the boy plays a leading part in the story. The abject contempt in which Gypsies are held throughout the whole of south-eastern Europe renders it probable that none but a Gypsy would thus have described a member of the race. The story, too, from its opening clause, a greeting to the ‘goodly company,’ would seem to have been told by a professional story-teller—a kinsman, possibly, of Léon Zafiri. Krauss’s Croatian story (No. 98) of ‘The Gypsy and the Nine Franciscans’ is just ‘Les Trois Bossus’ of the trouvère Durant (Liebrecht’s Dunlop, p. 209); yet it has, to my thinking, a thoroughly Rómani ring. In Campbell’s Gaelic story of ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’ (No. 1) the hero’s young wife is carried off by a giant, and, following their track, he comes thrice on the site of a fire. If I were telling that story to Gypsies, I should say, not site of a fire, but fireplace: I fancy I can hear the Gypsies’ exclamations—‘Dere! my blessed! following de fireplaces. Course he’d know den which way de giant had gone.’ I could cite a good score of similar instances; but I will content myself with this footnote from Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (ed. 1873, iv. 102):—‘Besides the prophetic powers ascribed to the Gypsies in most European countries, the Scottish peasants believe them possessed of the power of throwing upon bystanders a spell, and causing them to see the thing that is not.... The receipt to prevent the operation of these deceptions was to use a sprig of four-leaved clover. I remember to have heard (certainly very long ago, for at that time I believed the legend), that a Gypsy exercised his glamour over a number of persons at Haddington, to whom he exhibited a common dunghill cock, trailing what appeared to the spectators a massy oaken trunk. An old man passed with a cart of clover; he stopped, and picked out a four-leaved blade; the eyes of the spectators were opened,—and the oaken trunk appeared to be a bulrush.’ But that is just Grimm’s No. 149, ‘The Beam’: what folklorist has ever associated ‘The Beam’ with the Gypsies?

Theory.

To recapitulate, my theory, then, is this:—The Gypsies quitted India at an unknown date, probably taking with them some scores of Indian folk-tales, as they certainly took with them many hundreds of Indian words. By way of Persia and Armenia, they arrived in the Greek-speaking Balkan Peninsula, and tarried there for several centuries, probably disseminating their Indian folk-tales, and themselves picking up Greek folk-tales, as they certainly gave Greek the Rómani word bakht, ‘fortune,’ and borrowed from it paramísi, ‘story,’ and about a hundred more terms. From the Balkan Peninsula they have spread since 1417, or possibly earlier, to Siberia, Norway, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Brazil, and the countries between, everywhere probably disseminating the folk-tales they started with and those they picked up by the way, and everywhere probably adding to their store. Thus, I take it, they picked up the complete Rhampsinitus story in the Balkan Peninsula, and carried it thence to Roumania and Scotland; in Scotland, if John MacDonald was any sort of a Gypsy, they seem to have picked up ‘Osean after the Feen.’

It is not so smooth and rounded a theory as I hoped to be able to present to folklorists, or as I might easily have made it by suppressing a little here and filling out somewhat there. But at least I have pointed out a few fresh parallels; I have, thanks to Mr. Sampson’s generosity, enriched our stock, not of English folk-tales, but of folk-tales collected in England and Wales; [37] and I have, I hope, stimulated a measure of curiosity in the strange, likeable, uncanny race, whom ‘Hans Breitmann’ has happily designated ‘the Colporteurs of Folklore.’ I let my little theory go reluctantly, but invite the fullest argument and discussion. There is nothing like argument. I was once at a meeting of a Learned Society, where a friend of mine read a most admirable paper. Then uprose another member of that Learned Society, and challenged his every contention. In a rich, sonorous voice he thus began: ‘Max Müller has said (and I agree with Max Müller), that Sanskrit in dying left twins—Chinese and Semitic.’

GYPSY FOLK-TALES