Source.—Halliwell, Nursery Rhymes.
Parallels.—It is possible that this is an Eastern "sell": it occurs at any rate as the first episode in Fitzgerald's translation of Jami's Salámán and Absál. Jami, ob. 1492, introduces the story to illustrate the perplexities of the problem of individuality in a pantheistic system.
Lest, like the simple Arab in the tale,
I grow perplext, O God! 'twixt me and Thee,
If I—this Spirit that inspires me whence?
If Thou—then what this sensual impotence?
In other words, M. Bourget's Cruelle Enigma. The Arab yokel coming to Bagdad is fearful of losing his identity, and ties a pumpkin to his leg before going to sleep. His companion transfers it to his own leg. The yokel awaking is perplexed like the pantheist.
If I—the pumpkin why on you?
If you—then where am I, and who?
Source.—Told to Mrs. Balfour by a little' girl named Sally Brown, when she lived in the Cars in Lincolnshire. Sally had got it from her mother, who worked for Mrs. Balfour. It was originally told in dialect, which Mrs. Balfour has omitted.
Parallels.—Miss Cox has included "Tattercoats" in her exhaustive collection of parallels of Cinderella (Folk-Lore Society Publications, 1892), No. 274 from the MS. which I had lent her. Miss Cox rightly classes it as "Indeterminate," and it has only the Menial Heroine and Happy Marriage episodes in common with stories of the Cinderella type.
Remarks.—"Tattercoats" is of interest chiefly as being without any "fairy" or supernatural elements, unless the magic pipe can be so considered; it certainly gives the tale a fairy-like element. It is practically a prose variant of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid," and is thus an instance of the folk-novel pure and simple, without any admixture of those unnatural incidents which transform the folk-novel into the serious folk-tale as we are accustomed to have it. Which is the prior, folk-novel or tale, it would be hard to say.
