Chapter XIX: Raja Rasalu

_Source._--Steel-Temple, _Wideawake Stories_, pp. 247-80, omitting "How Raja Rasalu was Born," "How Raja Rasalu's Friends Forsook Him," "How Raja Rasalu Killed the Giants," and "How Raja Rasalu became a Jogi." A further version in Temple, _Legends of Panjab_, vol. i. _Chaupur_, I should explain, is a game played by two players with eight men, each on a board in the shape of a cross, four men to each cross covered with squares. The moves of the men are decided by the throws of a long form of dice. The object of the game is to see which of the players can first move all his men into the black centre square of the cross (Temple, _l. c._, p. 344, and _Legends of Panjab_, i. 243-5). It is sometimes said to be the origin of chess.

_Parallels._--Rev. C. Swynnerton, "Four Legends about Raja Rasalu," in _Folk-Lore Journal_, p. 158 _seq._, also in separate book much enlarged, _The Adventures of Raja Rasalu_, Calcutta, 1884. Curiously enough, the real interest of the story comes after the end of our part of it, for Kokilan, when she grows up, is married to Raja Rasalu, and behaves as sometimes youthful wives behave to elderly husbands. He gives her her lover's heart to eat, _à la_ Decameron, and she dashes herself over the rocks. For the parallels of this part of the legend see my edition of Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_, tom. i. Tale 39, or, better, the _Programm_ of H. Patzig, _Zur Geschichte der Herzmäre_ (Berlin, 1891). Gambling for life occurs in Celtic and other folk-tales; _cf._ my List of Incidents, _s. v._ "Gambling for Magic Objects."

_Remarks._--Raja Rasalu is possibly a historic personage, according to Capt. Temple, _Calcutta Review_, 1884, p. 397, flourishing in the eighth or ninth century. There is a place called Sirikap ka-kila in the neighbourhood of Sialkot, the traditional seat of Rasalu on the Indus, not far from Atlock.

Herr Patzig is strongly for the Eastern origin of the romance, and finds its earliest appearance in the West in the Anglo-Norman troubadour, Thomas' _Lai Guirun_, where it becomes part of the Tristan cycle. There is, so far as I know, no proof of the earliest part of the Rasalu legend (_our_ part) coming to Europe, except the existence of the gambling incidents of the same kind in Celtic and other folk-tales.