Page:Indian Fairy Tales (Stokes, 1879).djvu/268

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
256
Indian Fairy Tales.

hurt 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 and a gold casket containing a second 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 come 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. Ill, 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 Chámpákalí's suitors.

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