The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 13 - Sir Richard Francis Burton (large screen ebook reader .txt) 📗
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[FN#430] The enchanted pitcher does duty here for the witches’
broomstick and the fairies’ rush of European tales, but a similar conveyance is, I think, not unknown to Western folk-lore.
[FN#431] In a Norse story the hero on entering a forbidden room in a troll’s house finds a horse with a pan of burning coals under his nose and a measure of corn at his tail, and when he removes the coals and substitutes the corn, the horse becomes his friend and adviser.
[FN#432] M. Dozon does not think that Muslim customs allow of a man’s marrying three sisters at once; but we find the king does the same in the modern Arab version.
[FN#433] London: Macmillan and Co., p. 236 ff.
[FN#434] This recalls the biblical legend of the widow’s cruse, which has its exact counterpart in Singhalese folk-lore.
[FN#435] This recalls the story of the herd-boy who cried “Wolf!
wolf!”
[FN#436] Again the old notion of maternal and paternal instincts; but the children don’t often seem in folk-tales, to have a similar impulsive affection for their unknown parents.
[FN#437] Colotropis gigantea.
[FN#438] R�kshashas and r�kshas�s are male and female demons or ogres, in the Hind� mythology.
[FN#439] Literally, the king of birds, a fabulous species of horse remarkable for swiftness, which plays an important part in Tamil stories and romances.
[FN#440] Here we have a parallel to the biblical legend of the passage of the Israelites dryshod
[FN#441] Demons, ogres, trolls, giants, et hoc genus omne, never fail to discover the presence of human beings by their keen sense of smelling. “Fee, faw, fum! I smell the blood of a British man,”
cries a giant when the renowned hero Jack is concealed in his castle. “Fum! fum! sento odor christianum,” exclaims an ogre in Italian folk tales. “Femme, je sens la viande fra�che, la chair de chr�tien!” says a giant to his wife in French stories.
[FN#442] In my popular “Tales and Fictions” a number of examples are cited of life depending on some extraneous object—vol. i.
pp. 347-351.
[FN#443] In the Tamil story-book, the English translation of which is called “The Dravidian Nights’ Entertainments,” a wandering princess, finding the labour-pains coming upon her, takes shelter in the house of a dancing-woman, who says to the nurses, “If she gives birth to a daughter, it is well [because the woman could train her to follow her own profession’], but if a son, I do not want him;—close her eyes, remove him to a place where you can kill him, and throwing a bit of wood on the ground tell her she has given birth to it.”—I daresay that a story similar to the Bengali version exists among the Tamils.
[FN#444] It is to be hoped we shall soon have Sir Richard Burton’s promised complete English translation of this work, since one half is, I understand, already done.
End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Supplemental Nights, Volume 13 by Sir Richard F. Burton.
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