The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 13 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (summer reading list txt) 📕

N�ma,” when the adopted son of the robber chief is brought with other captives, before the king (he is really the king’s own son, whom he and the queen abandoned in their flight through the desert), his majesty’s bowels strangely yearned towards the youth, and in the conclusion this is carried to absurdity: when Bakhty�r is found to be the son of the royal pair, “the milk sprang from the breasts of the queen,” as she looked on him—albeit she must then have been long past child-bearing!

 

[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.