SOME NOTES ON HOMERIC FOLK-LORE.

BY W. CROOKE.

(Continued from p. 77.)

As we have already seen, Homer carefully selects the traditions which he uses, and though he has omitted much, he has provided us with a large number of Sagas and Märchen; the former being tales told of supernatural personages, of heroes and heroines who have definite names and are supposed to have once actually existed, or are attached to definite places; the latter being vague, impersonal, indefinite, in short, more in the manner of the fairy tale. Some critics have attempted to draw a distinction between the two epics-that the Iliad is made up of Sagas, the Odyssey of Märchen. But this statement is not entirely accurate. Thus the main subject of the Odyssey is the Saga of the Absent Husband, who recovers his wife after many adventures, in which Tokens of Recognition, like the bed of Odysseus, the scar left by the boar, the facts known to Penelope and Laertes alone, form a leading part.1 Here it may be remarked that in tales of this class the hero is very often recognised by his skill in cooking. In the Mahabharata, Nala is recognised in this way, and the same incident occurs in the Arab tale of Nur-al-din Ali and his son Badral-din Hasan, where he is identified by his skill in cooking the pomegranate conserve. It is, in this light, suggestive,

that when Odysseus offers to serve the Wooers he says, "No mortal may vie with me in the business of a servingman, in piling well a fire, in cleaving dry faggots, and in carving and roasting flesh and in pouring of wine."1 In the same category is the testing of the hero's skill in the competition of shooting through the rings of the axes, which also occurs in the Panjab tale of Rasalu, while in the Ramayana Rama's arrow flies through seven palm trees and through the hill behind them.2

Tales of the Absent Husband type are to be found in a Chinese Saga; in a Greek tale from Kato Sudena; in an Italian story; in one of Grimm's German tales; largely in ballad literature, as in those of Hind Horn and King Horn; and in the Arabian Saga of Kamaralzaman and Badaura. These tales seem to fall into two groups-one where the separation is caused by a misunderstanding; the other, where, as in the German story, the hero goes away for some other reason. With this is combined in the Odyssey the Saga of the Wooing and the means by which the faithful wife baffles her importunate lovers.1

In the Saga of Bellerophon 5 we have, first, the only

1 Od. xv. 319 ff.

2 Swynnerton, Romantic Tales, 213; Cambridge Jataka, v. 68; Griffith, Ramayan, 228, 338.

Dennys, Folk-lore of China, 161; Von Hahn, Griechische und Albanesische Märchen, i. 266; Pitrè, Biblioteca delle Tradizione Popolare Siciliani, v. 146; Grimm, Household Tales, No. 101; Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. i.; Burton, Nights, iii. 1 ff. For these references I am indebted to Mr. Sidney Hartland. See also Lang, Homer and the Epic, 226 f.

This I have already discussed in Folk-lore, ix. 97 ff. Mr. Monro (Odyssey, ii. 302) objects to my solution on the ground that Telemachus claims the right to dispose of his mother's hand. This does not seem relevant. Naturally he does so as head of the house in the absence of his father. But we find that pressure is put upon her by his parents and brethren also (Odyssey, xv. 16, xix. 158).

2

mention of writing in the epics. It is remarkable that in the Ramayana also, the "kernel" of which was composed before 500 B.C., we have only one mention of writing in the form of marks on arrows, which were probably spells to make them reach their mark.1 Recent enquiries show that various forms of writing were current in the eastern Aegean at a date much earlier than is commonly supposed. Cuneiform characters were probably in use in Cyprus about 1500 B.C.; the Babylonian custom of writing on clay tablets passed as far west as Crete, and it was adopted by the Mycenaeans of Knossos for their pictographic script; a system independent of this seems to have been in use in Mycenae. "The clay archives of the palace of Knossos," says Mr. A. J. Evans, "conclusively show that in the Aegean world there existed, at least as early as the 15th century B.C., a highly developed form of linear script containing a series of forms practically identical with those in use down to a much later date by the Greeks of Cyprus." In the Homeric passage which we are discussing it is worth while to notice, first, that the contents of the tablet, "many deadly things" (Ovμoplópa woλλá), seems to imply that writing was then regarded as a semi-magical art; secondly, I would venture to suggest a view which I have not seen in any of the commentaries which I have been able to consult, that the phrase describing the tablet (ev tívaki πTukT@), which implies, as Mr. Leaf says, a double wooden tablet with the writing inside, and sealed up, may have been an imitation of the method in use among the Babylonians of protecting valuable documents within an outer envelope of clay.3

1 Griffith, Ramayan, 407.

2 Hale, The Oldest Civilisation in Greece, 138 ff.; A. J. Evans, Journal Hellenic Studies, xvii. 327 ff., xxi. 339; Flinders Petrie, Journal Anthropological Institute, xxix. 204 f., xxx. 217.

In this Saga we have also the Letter of Death, which the hero was to show to the father of Anteia that he might be slain. We are reminded of David's letter to Joab: "Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten and die"; of Somadeva's tale of Adityavarman, who directs his ally to slay the wise minister, Sivavarman, or of the treacherous queen, Kāvyā-lankārā, who plans in the same way the death of the gallant princes, the sons of her rival; of Grimm's German story of the Devil with the Golden Hair, where the king writes in a letter to the queen, "As soon as the boy arrives with this letter, let him be killed and buried, and all must be done before I come home"; of Ahmed the Orphan in the Seven Wazirs, where the bearer hands the letter to another, who suffers in his stead, whence it was adopted into the Gesta Romanorum, in the tale where the innocent lad delays to hear Mass, and the contriver of the plot, who bears the fatal letter, is flung into the furnace.1 The incident, in fact, is so familiar, that in oriental folk-lore such letters have acquired a special name, "those of Mutalammis, the poet." 2

We find, again, in the Saga of Bellerophon the very common tale of seduction successfully resisted by the continent hero, which we meet in Semitic literature in the tale of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, the Yusuf and Zuleikha of the more modern East, itself derived from the old Egyptian tale of the two brothers, Satu and Anapu. Buddhist story-tellers adopted the incident in the tales of Kunāla and the wife of the Emperor

3

1II. Samuel, xi. 14; Tawney, Katha, i. 27, 383; id. Kathākoça, 172; Grimm, Household Tales, i. 120; Clouston, Popular Tales, ii. 465; id. Sindibad, 138; Temple-Steel, Wideawake Stories, 410; North Indian Notes and Queries, iv. 85; Knowles, Folk Tales of Kashmir, 48.

Burton, Nights, xii. 68 f.

3 Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion (ed. 1899), ii. 318 ff.; Erman, Life

Asoka, Sarangdhara and his step-mother Chitrangi, Gunasarman and the wife of King Mahāsena, while the Babylonians used it in the story of Ishtar's charge against Gisdhubar.1 In classical literature it appears in the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus, who was worshipped as a god at Troezen, where he was regarded as a god of healing, and to him maidens before marriage offered their hair. It would be natural that the seduction myth should be connected with him to emphasise his purity.2

The Bellerophon Saga diverges into another cycle, that of Tasks imposed upon the hero. The king of Lycia orders him to slay Chimaira, to fight the Solymi and the Amazons. Finally, when the hero succeeds, and escapes from an ambush laid for him, he receives the hand of the king's daughter, the last an incident very common in the folk-tales and suggesting descent in the female line.3 We find in the epics, Tasks imposed on the hero in the case of Herakles forced by Eurystheus to bring from Erebus the hound of loathed Hades, and in the story of Neleus, who would give his daughter to none save he who could drive off the kine of mighty Ephicles. Of such Tasks we have many instances throughout the whole range of folk-lore. Like Herakles, Hans in the Lithuanian tale of Strong Hand and Strong Peter overcomes Cerberus and the Devil. In a Gypsy tale from Transylvania the test is to recover a ring from a fountain of boiling water. In the Eyrbyggja Saga, Styr says: "Thou shalt form a path through the

1 Clouston, Popular Tales, ii. 499; Waddell, Buddhism of Tibet, 29; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 248; North Indian Notes and Queries, iv. 85; Burton, Nights, v. 42; Boccaccio, Decameron, Day ii. Novel 8.

2 Miss Harrison, Mythology and Monuments, Intro. cliv.

3 Frazer, Lectures on Kingship, 231 ff.

Il. viii. 362 ff. [iii. B]; Od. xi. 621 ff., 288 ff., xv. 231 ff.