Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/68

Three fairies, passing over a meadow, find a beautiful piece of dung. They decide to turn it into a beautiful girl with a golden ring on her finger, who, so long as she wears this ring, is fated to say nothing but “Dung, dung, dung.” The ring, transferred to another person, carries the peculiarity with it. A prince passes and sees the beautiful girl, and in spite of her conversational defects takes her home and marries her. (The incident of the Virgin Mary Godmother, The Tinkling Linden, Bela la mare ma più bela la fia, and hundreds of others.) One day they go to mass. Affer mass there is a collection and a sermon. The girl, having forgotten her purse, puts the gold ring in the collector’s alms-salver. The preacher, seeing a fine gold ring in the salver, beckons the collector to bring it him, puts it on his finger and begins his sermon: “Dearly beloved brethren, Dung, dung, dung, dung, dung.” Hereupon the congregation stampedes, scandalized at this peculiar form of Papal benediction; but henceforth the young queen remains cured of her defect. This ring is almost the only link between La Merda and Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes, or Golden Locks; but the incident of the gold ring on the pike’s fin turns up in a thousand different forms. We have seen it in the Sakuntala, in All’s Well that Ends Well, and in Boccacio; we have it in the King of Thule and a Lowland Scotch variant of the Sakuntala legend; nay, this image of the disappearance of the golden apple of the Arctic circle into its black sea of sunless winter has so taken hold of popular imagination that it has become embodied in custom, and we have the Papal fisherman’s ring, the wedding ring, and the gold ring worn by the boys in their left ear all through the Venetian province, as well as the ring with which the Doge married the Adriatic. Lastly, in the legend of the piece of money found in the fish’s mouth we have another form of the primitive myth, unless indeed it was that the myth so impressed Christ’s mind, that he took it into his head to act it by means of ground-baiting, and the simple, ignorant, and superstitious Christians have since dubbed this commonplace trick of fishing craft, a miracle—something, that is to say, according to their confused ideas, which reverses the ordinary laws of nature, and proves the performer of it to be a direct Incarnation of the Divinity.

The other story of a local type similar to La Merda to which I alluded, is a Slovenian one called The Lake of Carlovics. In this story a Wallachian peasant is induced by a black priest (or enchanter) to help him to exorcize two dragons out of the lake. They then fly through the air on their backs until they arrive at a certain town. Here they alight, kill the dragons, and sell their flesh for a large sum of money, because it is so hot in that town that the inhabitants, to keep alive, are obliged constantly to hold a piece of the dragon’s flesh under their tongues. Now this is obviously the popular, poetical way of saying that some one, long ago, made a lucrative business of collecting the ice of the Lake of Carlovics, and selling it in some hot southern town in the neighbourhood; but the black priest or prince (the two words are closely connected in Slavonic) is our friend of the Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes story, and the dragon is the gentleman that so frequently keeps guard over the enchanted beauty. The black priest or sorcerer is, in fact, the long black night of the Arctic winter, who, after the three days’ struggle, flies out of the window as a raven; and the dragon is the frost and ice—his agent in keeping nature spell-bound. This story forms a remarkable instance of how easily the most commonplace events become distorted into legends of miraculous events, by the imagination of the ignorant and superstitious, and how they become a sort