12 BLOOMFIELD— OX THE ART OF 



king's officers. But the Purohita says : " I have not touched your 

 wife." And the wife says : " Was it not yourself that I embraced? " 

 And the situation, in the manner of the Vampire-stories, remains a 

 puzzle. 



The most important aspect of our theme is that which tells how 

 a certain king, either Mukunda or Vikrama, was tricked out of his 

 body by a wily companion. In both versions figure a parrot, and a 

 devoted and observant queen ; and in both stories the king finally 

 regains his own body. Nevertheless, the two types of story show 

 very individual physiognomies. The Vikrama story, in an essen- 

 tially Hindu form, has been accessible since a very early date (1817) 

 in " M. le Baron Lescallier," Le Trone Enchante, New-York, de 

 I'imprimerie de J. Desnoues, No. 7, Murray-Street, 1817. This, as 

 the translator explicitly states, is a translation from the Persian 

 " Senguehassen Batissi," which in its turn is a version of the Hindu 

 cycle of stories best known (though not exclusively so) under the 

 names of " Sinhasanadvatrihgika," or, " The 32 Stories of the 

 Throne Statues " ; or " Vikrama Carita, the History of King Vik- 

 rama."-* Benfey traces the Vikrama version, or echoes from it, 

 through five Western story collections, all of which are certainly 

 based upon Hindu models, because they contain the feature of the 

 parrot, or, in the case of the Bahar Danush, of the sharok bird (the 

 maina, Skt. garika-'). But, as far as Hindu literature is concerned, 

 Benfey knew only a Greek rendering of the Mukunda story in 

 Galanos' translation of the Hitopadega. 



The Mukunda version was made accessible to Europeans con- 

 siderably later than Lescallier's Vikrama version. Galanos, "Xtro- 

 vaSaa-aa rj UavTcra Tavrpa,'- pp. 20 ff., rendered it into Greek in 185T 

 (see Benfey, 1. c, p. 4), and Benfey translated it from Galanos in 

 Paiicatantra, \'ol. H., pp. 124 ff. Since then Hertel found the 

 original of Galanos in the Biihler manuscript of the Paficatantra ; 



^* See A. Loisseleur Deslongchamps, " Essai sur les Fables Indiennes," p. 

 175, note 5 (who draws attention to " looi Nights," LVII-LIX) ; Benfey, 

 Das Paiicatantra, p. 123. The Hindu classical versions of the Sihhasana do 

 not, as far as I have been able to find out, contain the story ; see especially 

 their summary, as made by Weber, " Indische Studien," XV, pp. 447 ff. 



'5 See my paper, " On Talking-Birds in Hindu Fiction," Festschrift an 

 Ernst Windisch, pp. 349 ff. 



