Hi 



♦ KNOWLEDGE 



[Aug. 24, 1883. 



told me voluntarily that they are confident that the ma- 

 thine would carry safely a rider encycling, two stone more 

 than myself over any roads. 



In the last few weeks I have been trying four two- 

 speed mahines, and very shortly will report ou tlieir 

 performance. 



THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 



By Edward Clodd. 



THE beast-fables cited in my last paper were drawn 

 from widely-severed sources, as illustrative of ideas 

 common to all barbarous races, concerning the community 

 of life in man and brute. 



They are thus shown to embalm the relics of a serious 

 philosophy, and the like is true of the great mass of folk- 

 tales of wliich they are a branch. The connection of the 

 two is, indeed, manifest in the group of which " Beauty 

 and the Beast " is a well-known example, in which the 

 husband or wife is of fair human form by night and a 

 hideous monster by day, until freed from the sorcerer's 

 enchantment. Such tales have not fallen in the East to 

 the low level which they have reached here, because they 

 yet accord in some degree with extant superstitions in 

 India, whereas in Europe they find little or nothing to 

 which they correspond. But, dismissing these, we will 

 deal with a group of stories culled from various collections, 

 the leading idea of which is the dwelling apart of the soul 

 or heart, as the seat of life, from the body, in some secret 

 place, as in an egg, or a necklace, or a flower ; the destruc- 

 tion of the soul involving that of the body. 



In the Norse tale of " The giant who had no heart in his 

 body," the monster turns six princes and their wives into 

 stone, whereupon the seventh a^id only surviving son, 

 Boots, sets out to avenge their fate. On his journey he 

 saves the lives of a raven, a salmon, and a wolf, and the 

 wolf, having eaten his horse, compensates Boots by carry- 

 ing him to the giant's castle, where the lovely princess 

 who is to be his bride is confined. She promises to find 

 out where the giant keeps his heart, and by blandishments 

 and divers arts known to the fair sex both before and since 

 the time of Delilah, she worms out the secret. He tells 

 her that "far, far, away in a lake lies an island; on that 

 island stands a church ; in that church is a well ; in that 

 well swims a duck ; in that duck is an egg ; and in that 

 egg there lies my heart, you darling ! " Boots, taking fond 

 farewell of the princess, rides on the wolf's back to the 

 island. Then the raven he had befriended flies to the 

 steeple and fetches the key of the church ; the salmon, in 

 like return for kindness, brings liim the egg from the well 

 where the duck had dropped it. 



Tben the wolf told him to squeeze the egg, and as soon as ever 

 he did so, the giant screamed out. " Squeeze it again," said the 

 wolf ; and when the prince did so, the giant screamed still more 

 piteonsly, and begged and prayed so prettily to be spared, saying 

 he would do all that the prince wished if he would only not squeeze 

 his heart in two. " Tell him if ho will restore to life again your 

 six brothers and their brides, you will spare his life," said the wolf. 

 Yes, the giant was ready to do that, and he turned the sis brothers 

 into kings' sons again, and their brides into Idngs' daughters. 

 " Now squeeze the egg in two," said the wolf. With questionable 

 morality, doing evil that good might come, Boots squeezed the egg 

 to pieces, and the giant burst at once. 



Some interesting variants of this story are given by Mr. 

 Ealston in his " Russian Folk-Tales," in which Koshchei 

 is the counterpart of the giant, his death being brought 

 about by the destruction of the object in which his soul is 



hidden. In one story he is killed by a blow on the fore- 

 head inflicted by the mysterious egg — that last link in the 

 magic chain by which his life is darkly bound. In another 

 version the fatal blow is struck by a small stone found in 

 the yolk of an egg, which is inside a duck, which is inside 

 a hare, which is inside a stone, which is on an island. In 

 another variant, Koshchei attempts to deceive his fair 

 captive, pretending that his "death " resides in a besom, or 

 in a fence, both of which she adorns with gold in token of 

 her love. Then he confesses that his "death" really lies 

 in an egg, inside a duck, inside a log which is floating on 

 the sea. Prince Ivan gets hold of the egg, and shifts it 

 from one hand to the other. Koshchei rushes wildly from 

 side to side of the room. At last the prince breaks the 

 egg, and Koshchei falls on the floor and dies. 



In Serbian folk-tale the strength of a baleful being who 

 had stolen a princess lies in a bird which is inside the heart 

 of a fox, and when the bird was taken out of the heart and 

 set on fire, that moment the wife-stealer falls down dead, 

 and the prince regains his bride. In Bohemian, Gaelic, 

 Greek, Finnish, as also among the Hottentot and Samoyed 

 folk-tales, the same incident occurs of an external soul, 

 generally hidden in an egg, the breaking of which ends the 

 life of giant or other monster. In the " Arabian Kights " 

 the Jinni's soul is enclosed in the crop of a sparrow, and 

 the sparrow is imprisoned in a small box, and this again in 

 seven other boxes, which are put into seven chests, con- 

 tained in a cofler of marble, which is sunk in the ocean 

 that surrounds the world. Seyfel-Mulook raises the coffer 

 by the aid of Suley man's seal-ring, and having extricated 

 the sparrow, strangles it, whereupon the Jinni's body is 

 converted into a heap of black ashes. 



The most venerable form in which we possess the myth 

 of a man's soul outside his body comes to us from the 

 valley of the Nile, but before narrating this we must seek 

 in the " storied East " the close parallels to the folk-lore of 

 the Western Aryans. As in the Rig- Veda we are in 

 certain respects nearer to the older forms of the parent 

 language of the Indo-European peoples, so in the folk-tales 

 of Bengal and the Deccan we are nearer the earliest forms 

 of the fireside stories of both east and west. 



In the story of " Punchkin " given in Miss Frere's " Old 

 Deccan Days," a Rajah has seven daughters, and his wife 

 dying when they were quite children, he marries the widow 

 of his prime minister. Her cruelty to his children made 

 them run off" to a jungle, where seven neighbouring princes, 

 who were out hunting, found them, and each took one of 

 them to wife. After a time they again went hunting, and 

 did not come back. So when the son of the youngest 

 princess, who had also been enchanted away, grew up, he 

 set out in search of his mother and father and uncles, and 

 at last discovered that the seven princes had been turned 

 into stone by the magician Punchkin, who had shut up the 

 princess in a tower because she would not marry him. 

 Recognising her son, she plotted with him to feign agree- 

 ment to marry Punchkin if he would tell her where the 

 secret of his life was hidden. Overjoyed at her yielding to 

 his wish, the magician told her that it was true that he was 

 not as others. 



Far, far away, hundreds of thousands of miles from this, there 

 lies a desolate country covered with thick jungle. In the midst of 

 the jungle grows a circle of palm-trees, and in the centre of the 

 circle stand six chattees full of water, piled one above another ; 

 below the sixth chattee is a small cage which contains a little green 

 parrot ; on the life of the parrot depends my life, and if the parrot 

 is killed I must die." But, he added, this was not possible, because 

 thousands of genii " surround the palm-trees, and kill all who 

 approach the place." 



The princess told her son this, and he set forth on his 

 journey. On the way he rescued some young eagles from 



