Note 14 — Chapter II · ROUMANIAN-GYPSY STORIES

This last is a poorly-told story; still, not without its features of interest. It will be noticed that in it, as in many non-Gypsy variants, the dragons are rationalised into robbers (sometimes blackamoors). Of the Roumanian and the Bukowina-Gypsy versions the former seems to me the better on the whole. The opening of the Bukowina version cannot properly belong to the story, for it arouses an interest in the mother, who yet turns out a bad lot.14 Its close, however, is decidedly superior. What a picture is that of the mother and the dragon singing and dancing, and what a one that of the blinded horse and the crows! In both versions there is the same omission—the inquiry into the seat of the hero’s strength; and in the Bukowina one no use is made of the milk from the she-bear and the wild sow, nor are we told of the hero’s first meeting with Wednesday. Plainly the Roumanian version is not derived from the Bukowina one, nor the Bukowina one from the Roumanian; but they point to an unknown, more perfect original. Even as they stand, however, both are better than any of the non-Gypsy variants known to me. These include five from Hahn’s Greek collection (i. 176, 215; ii. 234, 279, 283); one in Roumanian Fairy Tales, by E. B. M. (Lond. 1884, pp. 81–89), resembling the Hungarian-Gypsy version; three German and one Lithuanian, cited by Hahn (ii. 236); one Russian, summarised by Ralston (p. 235); the well-known ‘Blue Belt’ in Dasent’s Tales from the Norse (p. 178); and Laura Gonzenbach’s No. 26, ‘Vom tapfern Königssohn’ (Sicil. Mär, i. 158–167), where the hero is cut in pieces by his supposed stepfather, the robber-chieftain, packed into a saddle-bag, and carried by his ass to a hermit, who revives him, after which the story drifts off into our No. 45.