Chapter IV: Introduction: Distribution of Gypsies (3)

Paspati was, obviously, no folklorist; the folk-tales to him were valuable solely as so much linguistic material. But every word almost of the above deserves the closest consideration. I have tried, but in vain hitherto, to recover some trace of those ‘several volumes’; their destruction would be a grievous loss to the science of folklore. [20] Still, from passages cited in the vocabulary, one can guess at in some cases, and in others actually identify, a portion of their contents. Thus, when one finds, ‘The Sun said to her, “Thou art pretty, and thou art good; thou art not as pretty as Maklítcha”’ (p. 580), one may feel sure that the Tchinghianés must possess some such version of Grimm’s ‘Little Snow-white’ (No. 53) as ‘Marietta et la Sorcière, sa Marâtre,’ in Carnoy and Nicolaides’ Traditions Populaires de l’Asie Mineure (p. 91), where the stepmother asks, not a mirror, but the Sun, ‘Hast thou seen any woman fairer than I?’ and the Sun answers, ‘I am fair, thou art fair, but not so fair as Marietta.’ Three passages point as clearly to Bernhard Schmidt’s ‘Die Schönste’ (Griechische Märchen, p. 88), or some other version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’:—‘In those days there was a man with three daughters. He said, “I am going to the city, I ask you what your souls desire me to bring you”’ (p. 394); ‘The eldest daughter said, “O father, bring me a thousand pieces of linen, to make dresses of”’ (p. 410); and ‘The middle daughter came, and she said, “Bring me, O father, the heaven with the stars, the sea with the fishes, the forest with the flowers”’ (p. 535). ‘My daughter, if your husband goes home, and one of his people kisses him, he will forget you, and you will remain in the forest’ (p. 555) must be an excerpt from a ‘Forsaken Bride’ tale; and in ‘He became a church, and the girl turned into a priest’ (p. 580) one recognises a widespread episode, which recurs in our No. 34, ‘Made over to the Devil,’ and No. 50, ‘The Witch.’ Similarly, our No. 21, ‘The Deluded Dragon,’ a Bukowina-Gypsy version of ‘The Valiant Little Tailor,’ is foreshadowed by—‘I am looking for the biggest mountain, to seize you, and fling you there, that not a bone of you may remain whole,’ on which Paspati observes that ‘this story relates the combat of a young man with a dragon, and the speaker here is the young man’ (p. 576). ‘She stuck a pin in her head; as soon as she had done so, the young girl turned into a pretty and beautiful bird’ (p. 514), may be matched from India (infra, p. 271); and ‘He gave the old man a feather, and said to the old man, “Take it and carry it to the maiden. I will come when she burns it,”’ is discussed on our p. 167. The ‘Beauty of the World’ (pp. 347, 511, 569) is familiar through Hahn; and with Hahn i. p. 90, compare ‘The mare was pregnant, and his wife, the queen, also was pregnant’ (p. 195). ‘The king said, “Come, my brother, and restore her to human shape” (a story of a woman punished by being turned into an ass),’ on p. 351, must belong to a variant of our No. 25, ‘The Hen that laid Diamonds’; and our No. 7, ‘The Snake who became the King’s Son-in-law,’ is suggested by two passages on pp. 262, 266: ‘He said to his mother, “I want the king’s daughter to wife”’ and ‘“How am I to plant trees, and make them grow up, and gather their fruits?” (from a story in which, as the price of his daughter’s hand, the father requires the suitor to plant trees in the morning and gather their fruits in the evening).’ One can almost reconstruct a story out of ‘We are forty cats; three are black, one is white’ (p. 411), ... ‘“Very early we go to the bath, and we strip ourselves naked, we take off our skins, and we become human beings” (a story of forty pretty women turned into cats),’ (p. 367), and ‘“When we are in the bath take the skins and fling them in the fire”’ (p. 368; cf. also p. 537). That story should belong to the husk-myth or swan-maiden type, as should also perhaps this passage on p. 381—‘“Why did you go off?” “There was a man.” “There was no man: a stick fell from the tree” (a story in which a man surprises three maidens at the bath. Two go off, but the third, whom the man is in love with, remains behind, and she holds this discourse with her sisters as they go home).’ Cats are pretty often referred to—e.g. ‘The cat found a shop where they sold honey. She dipped her tail in it, and then rolled it in the ashes’ (p. 344); ‘The cat sat down near them; she sees they are flinging away the precious stone with the guts of the fish that had swallowed it’ (p. 189); ‘The queen said to the lame cat’ (p. 195); and ‘The lame cat said to the lad, “I’ll give you a bit of advice”’ (p. 245). To the same story—perhaps a version of the well-known ‘Silly Women’—certainly belong ‘His wife said, “Wait a bit till they put him in the coffin”’ (p. 295) and ‘They put him in the coffin; he rose up in the coffin; and his wife said, “Hold! my husband who was in the coffin, is alive”’ (p. 227); and to the same story (? ‘Ali Baba’) doubtfully, these two passages: ‘He packed the riches on his horses, and brought them at midnight to his house, and he became a rich man’ (p. 349) and ‘He sat down and sewed up the belly of his brother, whom the robbers had killed’ (p. 422). Finally, some passages picked almost at random, to illustrate the wealth of Paspati’s collections, are, on p. 472, ‘He is the son of the King of the Serpents’; on p. 582, ‘I pray you earnestly, O my wise king, have all the doors shut, and let no man come in, and none go out’ (? ‘Master Thief’); on p. 195, ‘The King of India said, “I have no son”’; on p. 564, ‘She went into the forest, she found a shepherd, and she changed clothes with the shepherd, and took the road: she went walking on a whole month’; on p. 505, ‘One taper burnt at her head, the other at her feet’ (? a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ story); on p. 170, ‘I heard him, and I became a devil’; on p. 302, ‘She took a sword and an arrow, and set off. She did not wish any one, even her sisters, to know of her departure’; on p. 250, ‘The girl dressed herself, mounted her horse, and took her sword’; on p. 251, ‘I become a bird for thee, O apple of my eyes’; on p. 291, ‘I shall become a swallow, I shall sit on thy neck, to kiss the freckle upon thy cheek’; on p. 259, ‘Said the lad, “Who has taken my black bird?”’; on p. 356, ‘They lay down: the lad placed the sword between himself and the maiden’ (cf. Grimm’s No. 60, i. 262); on p. 421, ‘The old man said, “I give you forty days to find me”’; on p. 310, ‘The ass said, “All these years we have been with you, and to me you give bones to eat, and the dog has had to eat straw”’ [21]; and on p. 362, ‘The dead man goes last, the khodja goes in front.’

They are not very lively reading, these little scraps; still, they considerably extend our knowledge of Tchinghiané folk-tales. Of the six stories given in full by Paspati I have had to omit two. One of these, told by Christian nomads in the mixed style, is mixed indeed, more incoherent than the tale of the Great Panjandrum, as witness this sample:—‘The godfather sees her with flowers on her head. Song, “The wolf will eat the lamb; The wolf will eat the turkey; The cat hit the bear; A stranger was alarmed.”’ The other story, told by one of the wild Zapáris, opens with a boon granted by an old man to the youngest of a king’s five sons, to possess all the holes in the country. ‘He went; in the forest he went; he found a hole. He stooped down over the hole. “Come out of the hole, whoever is inside.” A woman came out; he asked her, “What are you doing down there?” “There are two wolves; I feed them.” “Feed them well; God be with you.” “And with you also.” Again he went and went; he found a hole, and stooped down over that hole. “Come out of the hole.” Out came a blackamoor,’ etc. It is not a bad opening, but the story wanders off into drivel and obscenity. Even of the four tales I do give, one, the ‘Story of the Bridge,’ is valuable solely for its theme, of the master-builder Manóli and his wife; if it is as old as it is corrupt, it should be of hoary antiquity. But the three others are really good folk-tales, versions of ‘The Grateful Dead,’ ‘Faithful John,’ and Campbell of Islay’s ‘Knight of Riddles.’ As always wherever possible, my translations are made direct from the original Rómani.

Dr. Barbu Constantinescu.

Probe de Limba si Literatura Tiganilor din România, by Dr. Barbu Constantinescu (Bucharest, 1878; 112 pp.), is an admirable collection of seventy-five Roumanian-Gypsy songs and thirteen folk-tales, in the original Rómani, with a Roumanian translation. The thirteen tales were got from thirteen different Gypsies, and naturally they vary in merit, the best to my thinking being ‘The Red King and the Witch,’ ‘The Vampire,’ and ‘The Prince and the Wizard.’ I have given eleven of them, with full annotations; of ‘The Stolen Ox’ and ‘The Prince who ate Men’ there are summaries on pp. 66 and 219. Dr. Barbu Constantinescu, who was latterly a professor at Crajova, is, I learn, dead; he must have known Rómani thoroughly, and may have left large collections.

Miklosich.

In part iv. of his great work, Ueber die Mundarten und die Wanderungen der Zigeuner Europa’s (Vienna, 1874), Dr. Franz von Miklosich published fifteen Gypsy folk-tales and nine songs from the Bukowina, in the original Rómani, with an interlinear Latin translation. They were collected by Professor Leo Kirilowicz, of Czernowicz, but when, where, or from whom is not told; and they, alone of Gypsy folk-tales, have been utilised by M. Emmanuel Cosquin to illustrate his admirable Contes de Lorraine (2 vols. 1886). I have given them all in full, except ‘The Rivals,’ part only of which is cited under No. 48, p. 181. ‘Tropsyn,’ ‘The Enchanted City,’ and ‘The Jealous Husband’ are perhaps the best; the last has a special interest through its relation to Cymbeline. In his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Zigeunermundarten (part iv., Vienna 1878), Miklosich published three more folk-tales, communicated by Professor Kirilowicz, Herr J. Kluch, and Dr. M. Gaster—the first a Lying Story from the Bukowina (No. 35), the second, ‘The Three Brothers,’ from the Hungarian Carpathians (No. 31), and the third, a mere fragment, from Roumania. This fragment is on the familiar theme of an emperor who till old age has had no heir; then his empress bears him a son; but just as the child is being shown to the people, two eagles carry it off. ‘Men,’ cries the empress, ‘if you will find my boy, I will become your servant, to wait on you, to wash your feet, to drink the water they are washed in, to quit my greatness, to make you king in my stead, if only you will find my boy.’ After which the story becomes hopeless nonsense, then suddenly stops—I fancy the Gypsy story-teller had got too drunk to continue.

Wlislocki.

Märchen und Sagen der Transilvanischen Zigeuner (Berlin, 1886, 157 pages), by Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki, differs from all other Continental collections of Rómani folk-tales in this, that its sixty-three stories are published for their intrinsic interest, not solely as linguistic curiosities. They are given in German only, not in the original. Hence they are open to a suspicion of having been here and there touched up, a suspicion somewhat confirmed in the rare cases where the original is appended in a footnote, as on p. 88. They are interesting, but only as a ‘restored’ building may be interesting; one doubts, one can never feel quite sure of anything. At the same time, I believe that such ‘improvements’ apply solely to the language, not to the subject-matter, of these stories. Their general genuineness is attested by their occasional lacunæ, as in ‘Godfather Death,’ which is closely identical with Grimm’s No. 44, but lacks the entire episode of the sick princess. Besides, except that his work is dedicated to Liebrecht, Dr. von Wlislocki gives no indication of acquaintance with the subject of folk-tales, whilst he has approved himself a master of Rómani by his Grammar of the Dialect of the Transylvanian Gypsies (Leipzig, 1884). He tells us in the preface to his Märchen that for several months of the summer of 1883 he wandered with a band of tented Gypsies through Transylvania and south-east Hungary, and that during his wanderings he collected these sixty-three stories, every one of which he was careful to verify from the lips of a second member of the race. His little work is easily accessible to every folklorist, so to the folklorists I leave the task of analysing its stories in detail, premising merely that, like their predecessors, they offer numerous analogies to non-Gypsy folk-tales, but that fourteen of them bear a distinctively Gypsy character, especially Nos. 15, 24, 31, 36, 51, 55. Haltrich also gives some Transylvanian-Gypsy stories (Zur Volkskunde der siebenbürgischen Sachsen, Vienna, 1885); and Vladislav Kornel, Ritter von Zielinski, contributed four Hungarian-Gypsy ones to the Gypsy Lore Journal for April 1890, pp. 65–73.

Dr. R. von Sowa.

Die Mundart der Slovakischen Zigeuner (Göttingen, 1887), by Dr. Rudolf von Sowa, of Brünn, is based on nineteen Slovak-Gypsy stories which he collected at Teplicz in 1884–85, and nine of which are given in the original Rómani without a translation. Dr. von Sowa also contributed four Gypsy folk-tales—Slovak and Moravian—to the Gypsy Lore Journal; and the Bohemian-Gypsy story of ‘The Three Dragons’ he sent me in manuscript. His stories have a high value for the purposes of comparison, but are inferior as stories to those of several other collections. I have given eight of them—Nos. 12, 19, 22, 41, 42, 43, 44, 60.

Dr. Kopernicki.

Isidore Kopernicki, M.D. (1825–91), published in 1872 a German monograph on Gypsy craniology, and, called from Bucharest to Cracow in 1870, collected thirty Polish-Gypsy folk-tales in 1875–77. A year or two before his death he put out a prospectus of a projected work on Rómani stories and songs, with a French translation; but the work never found a publisher. Six, however, of his stories appeared in the Gypsy Lore Journal, and are reproduced here, Nos. 45–50. They are one and all so admirable as stories and valuable as folklore that I cannot but hope some folklore society or some individual folklorist may purchase and publish the entire collection—Madame Kopernicki, I believe, is still a resident of Cracow.

John Roberts.

Twenty to thirty years ago I knew hundreds of Gypsies in most parts of England and Wales. But the Rómani dialect was in those days my all-in-all; I would walk or ride thirty miles, and feel richly rewarded if I came back with two or three new words, such as mormússi, midwife, or taltoráiro, crow. I knew little or nothing about folklore, and cared less; the few stray odds and ends of it that I picked up among the people are scattered mostly through my In Gypsy Tents (Edinb. 1880). At Virginia Water, in 1872, I remember old Matty Cooper telling me how the plaice went about calling out, ‘I’m the King of the Fishes,’ which was why her mouth was made crooked (cf. Grimm’s No. 172, ‘The Sole’); and from a Boswell in, I think, 1875, I got the lying story of ‘Happy Boz’ll,’ which I give here, No. 36. But my one great find was my lighting on the Welsh-Gypsy harper, John Roberts (1815–94), of Newtown in Montgomeryshire. In Gypsy Tents contains a great deal about him and by him (pp. 78–81, 94–99, 149–158, 197–216, 269–278, 290–294, 299–319, 372–377); here, then, it may suffice to say that, though not a full-blooded Gypsy, he could speak Rómani, yes, and write Rómani, as no other Gypsy I have ever met at home or on the Continent. I know, indeed, of no other instance where the teller of folk-tales has also been able himself to transcribe them. He wrote out for me the two long folk-tales reprinted here (Nos. 54 and 55), and he had a wealth of others: I fear that many of them have perished with him. He was one of the finest of Welsh harpers; he spoke Welsh, English, and Rómani with equal fluency; and he was a man besides of rare intelligence. His tales, he would have it, were all derived from the Arabian Nights, ‘leastwise if it was not from my poor old mother, or else from my grandmother, and she was a wonderful woman for telling stories.’

Mr. John Sampson.

I may regret my own missed opportunities the less, as English and Welsh Gypsy folk-tales have found at length an ideal collector in my friend, Mr. John Sampson, the librarian of University College, Liverpool. No man could be better equipped for the task than he, as the nineteen stories here of his collecting will amply prove. Long a master of English Rómani, he has also during the last few years been making a profound study of the ‘deep’ Welsh dialect, the best-preserved of all the Gypsy dialects with the doubtful exception of that of the Turkish Tchinghiané. His promised work on the subject is anxiously looked for. But, more than this, he possesses the rare gift of being able to take down a story in the very words, the very accents even, of its teller. Hundreds of times have I listened to Gypsies’ talk, and in these stories of his I seem to hear it again: a phonograph could not reproduce it more faithfully. His ‘Tales in a Tent’ (Gypsy Lore Journal, April 1892, pp. 199–211) contained in a charming setting, from which, indeed, it has seemed a sin to wrench them, the three English-Gypsy stories of ‘Bobby Rag,’ ‘De Little Fox,’ and ‘De Little Bull-calf,’ given here as Nos. 51, 52, 53. They were got near Liverpool—the middle one from Wasti Gray, and the two others from her husband, Johnny Gray, who also told Mr. Sampson the story of ‘The Horse that coined Golden Guineas.’ [22] Then in 1896 from Matthew Wood, felling trees upon Cader Idris, and in 1897 from Cornelius Price in Lancashire, Mr. Sampson heard twenty-seven Welsh-Gypsy stories, about which he writes thus in letters:—

‘On the slopes of Cader I have laboured for days together taking down these things in a sort of phrenzy. No work could be more exhausting. To note every accent, to follow the story, and to keep the wandering wits of my Rómani raconteur to the point, all helped to make it trying work. For days together I have heard no English spoken, the Woods always talking Rómani, and the Gentiles Welsh. It is as well I did so at the time, for Matthew Wood has cleared his mountain of trees, and departed, God knows whither. Three journeys into Wales, and many letters to post-offices and police-stations, have failed to find him. Nor can I chance upon his mother again. Matthew got these stories from his grandmother, Black Ellen, who, he says, knew two hundred stories, many of them so long that their narration occupied four or five hours. In listening to these tales, I think what struck me most was the severity of their style, reminiscent of Paspati’s and other Continental collections. A single word serves often as a sentence—”Chalé,” they ate; “Ratí,” it was night. The latter beats for compression the Virgilian “Nox erat.” ... I have added lately to my tales to the number of five or six, taken down chiefly in English from a South Welsh Gypsy named Cornelius Price.... I have Cornelius’s pedigree somewhere among my papers. The Prices are a South Wales family, not of the purest descent, who entered Wales from Hereford some generations ago. Some of them intermarried with the Ingrams. Cornelius is a son of Amos Price, from whom my old tinker Murray got most of his Rómani lore, including the version of the old ballad ‘Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave’ which I sent to MacRitchie, and which he sent to Professor Child. It has beautiful lines, like—

“She lifted up his dying head,
And kissed his cheek and chin,”

side by side with others like—

“And when he came to his brother dear,
He was in a hell of a fright.”

It is printed in Child’s collection. Cornelius got his stories from Nebuchadnēzar Price, his uncle. I met him at Wavertree, near Liverpool, but he has since left for Chester way, returning south. He is a man of middle age, or rather younger, perhaps, say thirty-five, a pleasant, harum-scarum fellow. His younger brother, he tells me, knows many more tales than he himself.... Some of the best tales Price forgets, or only remembers interesting fragments. Such as a story of a bull who fights a —— query, what? If he conquers, he tells the hero, the stream will flow down to him blood one side only, but, if he is defeated, blood each side. The bull is defeated, and, following his instructions, the hero cuts a thong from his tail upwards, finds in his body a “Sword of Swiftness,” and makes a belt of the hide. Of what tale is this a fragment? Cornelius assures me that his youngest brother knows thirty to fifty very long tales.... Had I time, I believe I could collect hundreds of such tales from English and Welsh Gypsies.’

(Three or four years ago I found myself in a library—I would not for worlds say where—alone with a complete set of the forty Reports of the Challenger Expedition. I drew out a volume reverently—its pages had never been opened. Tastes differ, and I own that myself I should be quite as much interested by the discovery (say) of a Welsh-Gypsy version of the ‘Grateful Dead,’ as by eight hundred and odd pages on the ‘Abdominal Secretions of the Lower Gasteropoda.’ Nay, I would even venture to suggest that a fraction, a very small fraction, of the money yearly devoted to the Endowment of Research by government, by our colleges, and by individual generosity, might well be apportioned to the collecting and preserving of English and Welsh Gypsy folk-tales. Every year will make the task harder; but, as it is, I believe Mr. Sampson could bag the whole lot in a couple of three months’ summer holidays. Holidays, quotha! I wonder what Mr. Sampson would say to my notion of holidays.)

Campbell of Islay.

Of the four stories which I cite (No. 73–76) from J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (4 vols. 1860–62), three were told by John MacDonald, travelling tinker, and the fourth by his old father. ‘John,’ Hector Urquhart writes, ‘wanders all over the Highlands, and lives in a tent with his family. He can neither read nor write. He repeats some of his stories by heart fluently, and almost in the same words. I have followed his recitation as closely as possible, but it was exceedingly difficult to keep him stationary for any length of time.’ To which Campbell himself adds:—‘The tinker’s comments on “The Brown Bear of the Green Glen” I got from the transcriber. John himself is a character. He is about fifty years of age. His father, an old soldier, is alive and about eighty; and there are numerous younger branches; and they were all encamped under the root of a tree in a quarry close to Inverary, at Easter 1859. The father tells many stories, but his memory is failing. The son told me several, and I have a good many of them written down. They both recite; they do not simply tell the story, but act it with changing voice and gesture, as if they took an interest in it, and entered into the spirit and fun of the tale. They belong to the race of “Cairds,” and are as much nomads as the gipsies are. The father, to use the son’s expression, “never saw a school.” He served in the 42d in his youth. One son makes horn spoons, and does not know a single story; the other is a sporting character, a famous fisherman, who knows all the lochs and rivers in the Highlands, makes flies, and earns money in summer by teaching Southerns to fish. His ambition is to become an under-keeper’ (i. 174–5).

There are three points to be specially noticed here. First, if I mistake not, these two tinkers, father and son, are the only Gaelic story-tellers whom Campbell describes as reciting and acting their stories; he repeats the same of the son in a passage which I quote on p. 288. Secondly, the father told ‘many stories,’ but one does not learn what they were, except that Campbell got from him a version of ‘Osean after the Feen’ (ii. 106), that the son ‘argued points’ in the story of ‘Conal Crovi’ (i. 142), and that he knew the story of the ‘Shifty Lad,’ though not well enough to repeat it (i. 353). ‘Many stories’ should mean more than these three and the four of our text. Lastly, these MacDonalds are said to ‘belong to the race of “Cairds,” and to be as much nomads as the gipsies are.’ But the question arises, Are they not Gypsies, or half-breed Gypsies, or quarter-breed Gypsies at any rate? To the Gypsy Lore Journal for January 1891, pp. 319–20, D. Fearon Ranking, LL.D., contributed this paper:—

Boat-dwelling Tinkers.

‘I spent the month of August this year (1890) at Crinan Harbour, in Argyllshire, and there came for a few moments across a family of “Tinklers,” who are, I fancy, worth following up for the sake of getting from them a stock of words. I was one morning on my way to the post-office at Crinan, and, lying at the slip in front of the office, I saw a good-sized boat, which I knew did not belong to the place. I crossed the road, and went down to see who the owners were. To my surprise, I found they were a party of “Tinklers.” On questioning them they told me that they always went about in this manner, sailing from place to place on the West Coast and among the Islands, and making and mending pots and pans. They had just put in for provisions, and were on the point of sailing for Scarba. The boat was a good-sized fishing smack, three-quarter decked, rigged, if I remember rightly, with a big lug-sail and jib, and a small lug aft, but on this point I am not quite certain. The party consisted of three men and two women, with two or three children. They were stunted in appearance, and quite young; the women reddish-haired, the men rather darker.

‘On a venture, I asked whether they spoke “Shelta,” [23] as I was anxious to learn something of this language, of which I knew nothing. One of the men said that they did speak it, and, on being questioned, gave the names of several common objects mentioned by me. Unfortunately, I had neither pencil nor paper with me, and was therefore unable to make any notes, and, the words being entirely strange to me, I could not retain them. The only word I can remember is yergan = “tin.”

‘One of the men suddenly said, “But we have another language, which I do not think any one knows but ourselves; it is not in any books.” “What do you call a ‘boat’ in your language?” I said. To my great astonishment, he replied, “Bero.” On my then asking for the words for “man,” “woman,” and “child,” he gave mush or gairo, monisha, and chavo. Feeling now tolerably sure of my ground, I said, “Kushto bero se duvo.” He stared at me as if I had been a ghost, and, on my continuing with a few more words, he called to one of the women in the boat and said, “Come here, I never saw anything like this. Here is a gentleman who knows our language as well as we know it ourselves.” I continued asking the names of various common objects, such as “fire,” “water,” the names of animals, parts of the body, etc., and soon noticed that for each they had two or three names, one being always good “Rommanis,” the other, I presume, “Shelta.” But my surprise was greatest when, on asking the name for a “hen,” the answer was “moorghee,” and then, as an afterthought, “kanni.” Now, can any one tell me where they got this word “moorghee” from? I have never met with it among any “Rommani foki” of my acquaintance, but know it only as the common Hindustani name for a fowl. Is it an old word which has been lost by others, but retained by this family? Or have they picked it up from some one of their number who has been in India soldiering?

‘Another surprise was in store for me. On asking them where they got this language from, one of the men said, “We got it from our grandfather. He could speak it much better than we can,” and then volunteered the information that this grandfather was a keeper to the Duke of Argyll, and had supplied Campbell of Islay with many of the Sgeulachdan in his Highland Tales. This must be either the John M’Donald, travelling tinker, referred to by Mr. MacRitchie in his article on the “Irish Tinkers and their Language” (Oct. 1889, p. 354), or a relation of his. An account of this family will be found in the notes to the tale of the “Brown Bear of the Green Glen” (Popular Tales, vol. i. pp. 174–175). It mentions that the father had served in the Forty-Second. Had he brought back this word moorghee with him from India? One of the sons is mentioned as being a keen sportsman. No hint is given, however, of their knowing any language but Gaelic. It would probably have astonished Campbell of Islay to find that they were masters of four tongues—Gaelic, Shelta, English, and Rommanis. It may be noticed that the accounts of occupation do not quite tally, as these tinklers distinctly stated that their grandfather was one of Argyll’s keepers. I should like to know whether any of the sons did actually hold such a post. This is all I could learn in an interview of, at the most, twenty minutes.’

Dr. Ranking, my friend for a quarter of a century, has a thorough knowledge of Rómani; I would trust his judgment as I would trust my own. I have never myself come across any Tinklers of the West Coast, but I have met scores in the Lothians and in the Border Country, and my observations on these tally closely with Dr. Ranking’s. The Lowland Tinklers have little or nothing of the Gypsy type, though they have a marked type of their own—a bleached, washed-out, mongrel type; their language has sunk to a mere gibberish, without the least trace of inflection, as different from the Welsh-Gypsy dialect as Pidgin-English from the English of Tennyson. None the less, side by side with such thieves’ cant as mort, woman, dell, girl, beenlightment, daylight, ruffie, devil, and patri, clergyman, that gibberish contains two or three hundred good enough Rómani words, as chúri, knife, drom, road, paúni, water, gad, shirt, and dústa lóvo, plenty money. Nay, a curious point is that it retains a few Rómani words which have been almost or wholly lost in the English and Welsh Gypsy dialects—shúkar, beautiful, háro, sword, klísti, soldier, kálshes, breeches, and pówiski, gun. On the other hand, Scottish thieves’ cant shows a much larger admixture of words of Rómani origin than does the English. We possess no early specimens of Scottish Rómani, but Scotland two centuries since would seem to have had as true Gypsies as any Stanleys or Boswells or Herons south of the Border. But the persecution of the race as a race lasted a hundred years longer in Scotland than in England, and it is probable that, whilst many of its chief members were hanged or drowned or transported to America, others fled southward—one finds to-day the Gaelic Gilderoy (‘red lad’) a Christian name among English Gypsies, and such surnames as Baillie, Gregory, and Marshall. Those who remained behind must have intermarried largely with Scottish vagrants, Irish vagrants, gangrel bodies generally: the Gypsy stream broadened out, and became correspondingly shallow. Nowadays, then, it is difficult to say of the Faa-Blyths, Taits, Norrises, Baillies, Douglases, or any other of the Tinklers I have met, whether they are more Gypsies or Gentiles; English Gypsies assuredly would not regard them as Gypsies. Still, they have all a dash of the Gypsy, stronger or weaker; and with these boat-dwelling Tinklers, whom Dr. Ranking describes, the dash was decidedly stronger. There can hardly be any doubt that the grandfather whom they spoke of as a keeper to the Duke of Argyll, was John MacDonald the younger, who at Inverary in 1859 had an ambition to become an underkeeper. [24]

Kounavine.

Lastly, in the Gypsy Lore Journal for April and July 1890, were two long articles by Dr. A. B. Elysseeff—‘Kounavine’s Materials for the Study of the Gypsies.’ According to these, Michael Ivanovitch Kounavine (1820–81) studied medicine at Moscow, and then having passed as doctor, for the thirty-five years 1841–76 wandered from Gypsy camp to Gypsy camp in Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia. Eight of those years were passed amongst the Gypsies of Germany, Austria, Southern France, Italy, England, and Spain; twelve amongst those of Asia Minor, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Iran, Hindustan, and the Deccan; ten amongst Russian Gypsies; and then from the Caucasus ‘the indefatigable traveller followed the transition of the European Gypsies into those of Kurdistan, and all along the Ural Mountains into those of Central Asia and Turan, on this occasion revisiting India and the ranges of Tian-Shan and the Himalayas.’ Meanwhile he collected an ‘immense store of materials, consisting of 123 tales, 80 traditions and legends, 62 ritual songs, and 120 smaller products of Gypsy poetry.... In the ancient legends the mythological elements assert themselves most strongly, and the characteristic features of the Hindu mythology are there so evident, that even the names in these tales recall the analogous divinities of the Hindu theology. These are Baramy, the proto-divinity, Jandra, the sun-god, Laki, Matta, Anromori, and others, in which one cannot fail to recognise the Hindu Brama, Indra, Lakshmi, Máta (Prithik, earth-mother), as well as the Zendic name of Ariman.... In the traditions and historical narratives one meets with classic names of towns known to the Greek geographers, such as Batala, Pourini, Espadi, Rikoi, Bikin, and Babili, in which it is not difficult to recognise the ancient towns Pattala, Poura, Aspadana (Ispahan), Rhagæ, Beikind, and Babylon, cited by Arrian and other historians and geographers.’

These are the merest pickings from Dr. Kounavine’s ‘colossal’ collections, which perished, alas! with him somewhere in Siberia, and are known to us only through an elaborate abstract drawn up in 1878 by Dr. Elysseeff, since himself also dead. First printed in the Transactions of the Russian Geographical Society (1882), that abstract, thanks to Dr. Kopernicki, appeared in English in the Gypsy Lore Journal, where it occupied twenty-five pages. It was quite right it should appear there; still, I cannot feel absolutely certain that there ever was any Dr. Kounavine at all. If there was, I am certain that nine-tenths of the discoveries claimed for him are the merest moonshine. To maintain that the Gypsies of England, France, Spain, and Italy arrived at their present habitats from Africa by way of Sicily, is, as has been shown, to evince a crass ignorance of the Rómani language. Equally absurd is it to maintain that ‘every Gypsy dialect contains a large number of words of non-Aryan origin: Aramaic, Semitic, and even Mongol words form 25 per cent. of the Gypsy vocabulary taken in its largest sense.’ For this implies that Aramaic is non-Semitic, as though one should speak of Gaelic and Celtic, or of German and Teutonic. Again, what of the sketch-map, according to which Dr. Kounavine seems to have found ‘fragmentary and confused traces of a primitive mythology’ somewhere about Newtown in Montgomeryshire and round the Cambridgeshire Wash? Newtown is a Welsh-Gypsy centre (I had shown it be such in 1880); but unquestionably its Gypsies would have retained some recollection of a visit from a mysterious Rómani-speaking foreigner, even after the lapse of thirty or forty years.

Theory as to Gypsy Folk-tales.

So there the folklorists have all that is essential—or rather all that I can give of the essential—for the right understanding of the following seventy-six folk-tales. And there I should have been quite content to leave them, did I not wish to disavow the theory imputed to me mistakenly by my friend, Mr. Joseph Jacobs. In his More English Fairy Tales (1894), p. 232, he speaks of ‘Mr. Hindes Groome’s contention (in Transactions Folk-Lore Congress) for the diffusion of all folk-tales by means of Gypsies as colporteurs.’ The paper I read before the Folklore Congress of 1891 was not on folk-tales at all, but on English popular superstitions; I certainly never contended that their diffusion was solely due to the Gypsies. Whilst as to Gypsy folk-tales, the first thing I ever wrote about them was forty-three lines in the Encyclopædia Britannica (vol. x. 1879, p. 615), which, with but forty stories to go by, concluded:—‘At present our information is far too scanty to warrant any definite conclusion; but, could it once be shown that the Asiatic possess the same stories as the European Gypsies, it might be necessary to admit that Europe owes a portion of its folklore to the Gypsies.’ And the last thing I wrote on the subject was twenty-seven lines in Chambers’s Encyclopædia (vol. v. 1892, p. 489), and they wound up:—‘According to Benfey, Reinhold Köhler, Ralston, Cosquin, Clouston, and other folklorists, most of the popular stories of Europe are traceable to Indian sources. But how? by what channels? One channel, perhaps, was the Gypsies.’

Gypsy Variants.

That seven years ago was my theory, if it may be dignified with so high-sounding a title; and that is my theory still. And it seems to me even now, that, though now we possess 160 Gypsy folk-tales, our store is still far too scanty to warrant any definite conclusion. We want the unpublished materials of Paspati and Kopernicki; we want Dr. von Sowa and Mr. Sampson to complete their collections; and we want, too, the Gypsy folk-tales, if such there be, of Spain, Portugal, Brazil, the Basque Country, Italy, Alsace, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, and Greece—above all, of Africa and Asia. [25] If a word like páni, water, is found in every Gypsy dialect from Persia to South America, from Finland to Egypt, one reasonably regards it as a true Rómani word, as one that the Gypsies have brought from their eastern home. Similarly, if a folk-tale could be shown to have an equally wide distribution among the Gypsies, we might reasonably believe that the Gypsies had brought it with them. But at present we know of no such wide distribution. We have five Gypsy versions of ‘The Master Thief’ (Nos. 11, 12), one from Roumania, two from Hungary, and two from Wales; and two of the cognate story, ‘Tropsyn’ (Nos. 27, 28), from the Bukowina and Wales. We have two of ‘The Vampire’ (No. 5), Roumanian and Hungarian; three of ‘The Bad Mother’ (Nos. 8, 9), Roumanian, Bukowinian, and Hungarian; two of ‘Mare’s Son’ (Nos. 20, 58), Bukowinian and Welsh; three of ‘It all comes to Light’ (Nos. 17, 18, 19), Bukowinian, Roumanian, and Slovak; two of ‘The Rich and the Poor Brother’ (Nos. 30, 31), Bukowinian and Hungarian; three of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ (No. 47), Polish, Hungarian, and Welsh; three of ‘The Master Smith’ (Nos. 59, 60), Welsh, Catalonian, and Slovak; two of ‘The Golden Bush and the Good Hare’ (Nos. 49, 75), Polish and Scotch; and four of ‘The Deluded Dragon’ (Nos. 21, 22), Bukowinian, Slovak, Transylvanian, and Turkish. It is something to have established this much; and it will be seen how enormously Mr. Sampson has extended the area of Gypsy folk-tales since 1896. But it still needs much greater extension.

Unique Features.

An absolutely unique story or incident is a very rare find in folklore. A few stories in the present collection I have not been able to match, e.g. ‘The Three Princesses and the Unclean Spirit’ (No. 10), ‘The Red King and the Witch’ (14), ‘The Prince and the Wizard’ (15), ‘Pretty-face’ (29), ‘A Girl who was sold to the Devil’ (46), and ‘The Black Dog of the Wild Forest’ (72). Then as to incidents, I have met with no non-Gypsy parallel to the somersault that in Gypsy stories almost invariably precedes a transformation (cf. footnote 2 on p. 16). I have met with none to the striking ordeal in ‘Mare’s Son’ (No. 20):—

‘He went to his brothers. “Good-day to you, brothers. You fancied I
should perish. If you acted fairly by me, toss your arrows up in
the air, and they will fall before you; but if unfairly, then they
will fall on your heads.” All four tossed up their arrows, and they
stood in a row. His fell right before him, and theirs fell on their
heads, and they died.’

‘The Seer’ (No. 23) offers a variant:—

‘And he said, “Good-day to you, brothers. You fancied I had
perished. You have pronounced your own doom. Come out with me, and
toss your swords up in the air. If you acted fairly by me, it will
fall before you; but if unfairly, it will fall on your head.” The
three of them tossed up their swords, and that of the youngest fell
before him, but theirs fell on their head, and they died.’

Then there is the fine conception, of frequent occurrence in Wlislocki’s Transylvanian-Gypsy stories, that the sun in the morning sets forth as a little child, by noon has grown to a man, and comes home at eventide weary, old, and grey. [26] And this again, from ‘The Hen that laid Diamonds’ (No. 25):—

‘The emperor there was dead, and they took his crown and put it in
the church; whosever head the crown falls on, he shall be emperor.
And men of all ranks came into the church; and the three boys came.
And the eldest went before, and slipped into the church; and the
crown floated on to his head “We have a new emperor.” They raised
him shoulder-high, and clad him in royal robes.’

The episode is reminiscent of ‘Excalibur’ in the old Arthurian legend. The story in which it occurs is identical with Hahn’s No. 36, but there the episode is wholly wanting. The multiplication of such seemingly unique Gypsy stories and incidents would certainly favour a belief in the originality of the Gypsies, would suggest that some at least of their stories are at first-hand, and not derived from Greeks, Roumans, Slavs, Teutons, or Celts.

Still, nothing would surprise me less than to come on non-Gypsy versions of one or all of these stories or incidents. The great mass of the collection can be paralleled from Grimm, Asbjörnsen, Hahn, Campbell, Cosquin, etc. Thus my No. 63 is Grimm’s ‘Our Lady’s Child’ (No. 3); No. 57 his ‘Youth who went forth to learn what Fear was’ (No. 4); No. 2 his ‘Faithful John’ (No. 6); No. 21 his ‘Valiant Little Tailor’ (No. 20); No. 38 his ‘Devil with the Three Golden Hairs’ (No. 29); No. 47 his ‘Robber Bridegroom’ (No. 40); No. 70 his ‘Frederick and Catherine’ (No. 59); No. 25 his ‘Two Brothers’ (No. 60); No. 68 his ‘Little Peasant’ (No. 61); No. 59 his ‘Brother Lustig’ (No. 81) and ‘Old Man made Young again’ (No. 147); No. 32 his ‘King of the Golden Mountains’ (No. 92); No. 17 his ‘Three Little Birds’ (No. 96); Nos. 55 and 73 his ‘Water of Life’ (No. 97); No. 43 his ‘Skilful Huntsman’ (No. 111); No. 25 his ‘Ferdinand the Faithful’ (No. 126); No. 41 his ‘Shoes that were danced to Pieces’ (No. 133); Nos. 20 and 58 his ‘Strong Hans’ (No. 166); and Nos. 11 and 12 his ‘Master Thief’ (No. 192); besides which his ‘Cinderella’ (No. 21), ‘Godfather Death’ (No. 44), and ‘The Sole’ (No. 172) are known to be current among the Gypsies. The Gypsies, then, by the showing even of our present meagre store of Gypsy folk-tales, have over ten per cent. of Grimm’s entire collection.

Which are the better, the Gypsy versions, or the non-Gypsy versions, can only be definitely determined when we can feel pretty sure of possessing the best Gypsy versions procurable. Take, for example, our story of ‘The Vampire’ (No. 5). The wretched Hungarian-Gypsy version of Dr. Friedrich Müller (1869) could not for a moment compare with Ralston’s fine Russian story of ‘The Fiend,’ but the Roumanian-Gypsy version of Barbu Constantinescu (1878) quite well can. The standard of Gypsy folk-tales should clearly be taken from the best, not the poorest, specimens; and the standard by that rule is high. Indeed, ‘The Red King and the Witch’ to me appears as good as anything in the whole field of folklore; and ‘Ashypelt,’ ‘The Jealous Husband,’ and half a dozen more of my collection seem only less good than it. But, of course, one’s own geese are all swans.

Literary Sources.

A curious point about these Gypsy stories is that in three or four of them one recognises an incident or a whole plot which, unless it be Gypsy, the Gypsies would seem to have derived from books. Here, for instance, are two parallel passages from No. 120 of the Gesta Romanorum and from the Bukowina-Gypsy story of ‘The Seer’ (No. 23):—

GESTA. GYPSY TALE.

Where to bend his steps he knew The youngest went into the woods, not, but arising, and fortifying and he was hungry, and he found an himself with the sign of the apple-tree with apples, and he ate Cross, he walked along a certain an apple, and two stag’s horns path until he reached a deep grew. And he said, ‘What God has river, over which he must pass. given me I will bear.’ And he went But he found it so bitter and hot, onward, and crossed a stream, and that it even separated the flesh the flesh fell away from him. And from the bones. Full of grief, he he kept saying, ‘What God has conveyed away a small quantity of given me I will bear. Thanks be to that water, and when he had God.’ And he went further, and proceeded a little further, felt found another apple-tree. And he hungry. A tree, upon which hung said, ‘I will eat one more apple, the most tempting food, incited even though two more horns shall him to eat; he did so, and grow.’ When he ate it, the horns immediately became a leper. He dropped off. And he went further, gathered also a little of the and again found a stream. And he fruit, and conveyed it with him. said, ‘God, the flesh has fallen After travelling for some time, he from me, now my bones will waste arrived at another stream, whose away; but even though they do, yet virtue was such that it restored will I go.’ And he crossed the the flesh to his feet; and eating stream; his flesh grew fairer than of a second tree, he was cleansed ever. of his leprosy.

Which is the better here, the nearer the original—the Geste of the Romans, or that of the Romanies? It is hard to determine; but of this I feel pretty sure, that, if any one were asked to say which of these two passages was monkish and which Gypsy, he would decide wrongly: there is such a tone of pious fortitude about ‘The Seer.’ The Welsh-Gypsy story of ‘The Three Wishes’ (No. 65) looks as though it were taken straight from Giambattista Basile’s tale of ‘Peruonto,’ i. 3, in the Pentamerone (1637)—a none too accessible work, one would fancy, and a tale that has not passed into popular folklore. Then there is the fine Bukowina-Gypsy story of ‘The Jealous Husband’ (No. 33), derived apparently from the novella ii. 9 of Boccaccio’s Decamerone (1358), the prototype of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Except that the Gypsy story is localised on the Danube, the plot is almost identical—the wager, the chest, the theft of the ring, the mole. It sounds unlikely that Gypsies, the most illiterate race in Europe, should have enriched their stock of folk-tales from Boccaccio. Still, that is how folklorists would probably account for the identity of the two stories, if those stories stood alone. But they do not; there are also four folk-tales at least to account for—Roumanian, German, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish Gaelic. And Campbell’s Gaelic story of ‘The Chest,’ whilst like Boccaccio’s, is in some points still liker that of the Bukowina Gypsies. On the whole, it seems easier to suppose that Boccaccio got his story directly or indirectly from the Gypsies, than that they got theirs from Boccaccio. But Gypsies, it will be urged, were unknown in Italy in Boccaccio’s day. That is by no means so certain. There was the komodromos with the blind yellow dog, who came from Italy in 544 A.D.; and there was the Neapolitan painter, Antonio Solario, ‘lo Zingaro,’ who was born about 1382. [27] And even though Boccaccio himself could never have seen Gypsies, many of his countrymen must have come across them outside of Italy—in Greece, in Corfu, in Crete, and in other parts of the Levant.

Questions of Date.

Sometimes, however, a date does seem to preclude the notion that the dissemination of this or that folk-tale can have been due to Gypsies. The ‘Grateful Dead,’ the first of our collection, is a case in point. The Turkish-Gypsy version is excellent—as good, indeed, as any known to me; but the story seems to have been current in England as early, at any rate, as 1420—the date assigned to the metrical romance of ‘Sir Amadas.’ Again, according to Mr. Jacobs’ More Celtic Fairy Tales, p. 229, ‘the most curious and instructive parallel to Campbell’s West Highland tale of “Mac Iain Direach” [= our No. 75] is that afforded by the Arthurian romance of Walewein or Gawain, now only extant in Dutch, which, as Professor W. P. Ker has pointed out in Folk-Lore, v. 121, exactly corresponds to the popular tale, and thus carries it back in Celtdom to the early twelfth century at the latest.’ Only, how from Celtdom has the story wandered to the Polish Gypsies of Galicia, whose tale of ‘The Golden Bush and the Good Hare’ (No. 49) is clearly identical?

Indian Parallels.

I raise these objections myself, knowing that, if I did not, some one else would certainly do so, with the gleeful remark, ‘Down goes the silly theory of the dispersion of folk-tales by Gypsies.’ By no means, necessarily. The theory may be inapplicable in these and in other cases; but what will the folklorists make of another Polish-Gypsy story, the ‘Tale of a Foolish Brother and of a Wonderful Bush’ (No. 45)? Of it we find a variant in the Welsh-Gypsy story of ‘The Dragon’ (No. 61), and a most unmistakable version in the Indian fairy-tale of ‘The Monkey Prince’ (Maive Stokes, No. 10, p. 41). The connection, indeed, between the Gypsy and the Indian folk-tale seems scarcely less obvious than that between páni, water, in Rómani, and páni, water, in Hindustani. This, I think, must be granted; but what, then, of the non-Gypsy versions, cited on p. 161, from Russia, Norway, and Sicily? Or take the Turkish-Gypsy story of ‘Baldpate’ (No. 2). It is identical, on the one hand, with Grimm’s ‘Faithful John’ (No. 6) and many more European versions, and, on the other hand, with the latter half of ‘Phakir Chand’ (Lal Behari Day’s Folk-tales of Bengal, pp. 39–52). Is it not possibly the link between them? And may not similar links be discernible in these eight parallels, where the notes on the Gypsy tales will supply the exact references:—

INDIAN. GYPSY. EUROPEAN.