Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs (best books to read for students TXT) 📕

Katha-Sarit-Sagara, trans. Tawney (Calcutta, 1880), I pp. 272⁠–⁠4. I have slightly toned down the inflated style of the original.

Parallels⁠—Benfey has collected and discussed a number in Orient and Occident, I 371 seq.; see also Tawney, ad loc. The most remarkable of the parallels is that afforded by the Grimms’ “Doctor Allwissend” (No. 98), which extends even to such a minute point as his exclamation, “Ach, ich armer Krebs,” whereupon a crab is discovered under a dish. The usual form of discovery of the thieves is for the Dr. Knowall to have so many days given him to discover the thieves, and at the end of the first day he calls out, “There’s one of them,” meaning the days, just as one of the thieves peeps through at him. Hence the title and the plot of C. Lever’s One of Them.

XII The Charmed Ring

Source.⁠—Knowles, Folktales of Kashmir, pp. 20⁠–⁠8.

Parallels.⁠—The incident of the Aiding Animals is frequent in folktales: see bibliographical references, sub voce, in my List of Incidents, Transactions of Folklore Congress, p. 88; also Knowles, 21, n.; and Temple, Wideawake Stories, pp. 401, 412. The Magic Ring is also “common form” in folktales; cf. Köhler ap. Marie de France, Lais, ed. Warncke, p. LXXXIV. And the whole story is to be found very widely spread from India (Wideawake Stories, pp. 196⁠–⁠206) to England (English Fairy Tales, No. xvii, “Jack and his Golden Snuffbox,” cf. Notes, ibid.), the most familiar form of it being “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp.”

Remarks.⁠—M. Cosquin has pointed out (Contes de Lorraine, p. XI seq.) that the incident of the rat’s-tail-up-nose to recover the ring from the stomach of an ogress, is found among Arabs, Albanians, Bretons, and Russians. It is impossible to imagine that incident⁠—occurring in the same series of incidents⁠—to have been invented more than once, and if that part of the story has been borrowed from India, there is no reason why the whole of it should not have arisen in India, and have been spread to the West. The English variant was derived from an English Gipsy, and suggests the possibility that for this particular story the medium of transmission has been the Gipsies. This contains the incident of the loss of the ring by the faithful animal, which again could not have been independently invented.

XIII The Talkative Tortoise

Source.⁠—The “Kacchapa Jātaka,” Fausböll, No. 215; also in his “Five Jātakas,” pp. 16, 41, tr. Rhys-Davids, pp. VIII⁠–⁠X.

Parallels.⁠—It occurs also in the Bidpai literature, in nearly all its multitudinous offshoots. See Benfey, “Einleitung,” §84; also my Bidpai, E, 4 a; and North’s text, pp. 170⁠–⁠5, where it is the taunts of the other birds that cause the catastrophe: “O here is a brave sight, looke, here is a goodly ieast, what bugge haue we here,” said some. “See, see, she hangeth by the throte, and therefor she speaketh not,” saide others; “and the beast flieth not like a beast;” so she opened her mouth and “pashte hir all to pieces.”

Remarks.⁠—I have reproduced in my edition the original illustration of the first English Bidpai, itself derived from the Italian block. A replica of it here may serve to show that it could be used equally well to illustrate the Pali original as its English great-great-great-great-great-great grandchild.

XIV Lac of Rupees

Source.⁠—Knowles, Folktales of Kashmir, pp. 32⁠–⁠41. I have reduced the pieces of advice to three, and curtailed somewhat.

Parallels.⁠—See Celtic Fairy Tales, No. XXII, “Tale of Ivan,” from the old Cornish, now extinct, and notes ibid. Mr. Clouston points out (Popular Tales, II 319) that it occurs in Buddhist literature, in “Buddaghoshas Parables,” as “The Story of Kulla Pauthaka.”

Remarks.⁠—It is indeed curious to find the story better told in Cornwall than in the land of its birth, but there can be little doubt that the Buddhist version is the earliest and original form of the story. The piece of advice was originally a charm, in which a youth was to say to himself, “Why are you busy? Why are you busy?” He does so when thieves are about, and so saves the king’s treasures, of which he gets an appropriate share. It would perhaps be as well if many of us should say to ourselves “Ghatesa, ghatesa, kim kárana?”

XV The Gold-Giving Serpent

Source.⁠—Pantschatantra, III v, tr. Benfey, II 244⁠–⁠7.

Parallels given in my Aesop, Ro. II 10, p. 40. The chief points about them are⁠—(1) though the tale does not exist in either Phaedrus or Babrius, it occurs in prose derivates from the Latin by Ademar, 65, and “Romulus,” II 10, and from Greek, in Gabrias, 45, and the prose Aesop, ed. Halm, 96; Gitlbauer has restored the Babrian form in his edition of Babrius, No. 160. (2) The fable occurs among folktales, Grimm, 105; Woycicki, Poln. Mähr. 105; Gering, Islensk. Aevent. 59, possibly derived from La Fontaine, X 12.

Remarks.⁠—Benfey has proved most ingeniously and conclusively (“Einl.” I 359) that the Indian fable is the source of both Latin and Greek fables. I may borrow from my Aesop, p. 93, parallel abstracts of the three versions, putting Benfey’s results in a graphic form, series of bars indicating the passages where the classical fables have failed to preserve the original.

Bidpai

A Brahmin once observed a snake in his field, and thinking it the tutelary spirit of the field, he offered it a libation of milk in a bowl. Next day he finds a piece of gold in the bowl, and he receives this each day after offering the libation. One day he had to go elsewhere, and he sent his son with the libation. The son sees the gold, and thinking the serpent’s hole full of treasure determines to slay the snake. He strikes at its head with a cudgel, and the enraged serpent stings him to death.