Note 22 — Chapter III · BUKOWINA-GYPSY STORIES

It must at least be nearly five hundred years since the ancestors of our Welsh Gypsies parted from those of their kinsfolk in Bukowina; yet the resemblance between these two versions still is marvellous. The talking horse, the entering into service at the castle, the feather, the fetching the bird, the fetching a lady (in the Bukowina version not the lady), the cabin even, the fetching the lady’s belongings, and the doom of the master—these eight details are common to both: the very order of them is identical. Non-Gypsy variants are Grimm’s ‘Ferdinand the Faithful’ (No. 126; ii. 153, 425), Cosquin’s ‘Le Roi d’Angleterre et son Filleul’ (No. 3, i. 32), his ‘La Belle aux Cheveux d’Or’ (No. 72, ii. 290), the Donegal story of ‘The Red Pony’ in W. Larmenie’s West Irish Folk-tales (1893, pp. 211–218), a Russian story summarised by Ralston (p. 287), and Laura Gonzenbach’s long Sicilian story, ‘Die Geschichte von Caruseddu’ (No. 83, ii. 143–155, 257–9). All six deserve careful study, but specially the last, which links these stories to the heroic version of ‘The Master Thief’ (supra, p. 51). For its plot, told briefly, is this:—Caruseddu and his two elder brothers go as gardeners to a dragu (rendered ‘Menschenfresser’ or ‘ogre,’ but query rather ‘dragon’). By the Hop-o’-my-thumb device of changing caps, as in ‘Tropsyn’ (cf. also Hahn, ii. 179–180), Caruseddu deludes him into devouring his own three daughters. The brothers then take service with a king—Caruseddu as trusted servant, the others as gardeners. They are jealous of Caruseddu, and get the king to send him to steal first the dragu’s talking horse, next his bed-cover with golden balls, and lastly the dragu himself. This last task he achieves by the trick of getting the dragu to try if a new coffin for (the supposed dead) Caruseddu is big enough.22 Still at his brothers’ suggestion, Caruseddu is now sent to fetch the daughter of the queen with the seven veils; he achieves this, like his former feats, with the help of the talking horse. The princess refuses to wed the king unless he recovers for her the veil and the ring she had lost on the way to him; Caruseddu recovers them by the aid of a grateful bird and a grateful fish (cf. the Welsh version). He also sifts a barnful of wheat, oats, and barley with the aid of grateful ants. Lastly, he has to plunge into a fiery furnace, but, smeared with foam snorted by the talking horse, he emerges uninjured, far fairer than before. The old and ugly king has to essay the same ordeal, and asks Caruseddu what he smeared himself with. Who, sickened at last by his master’s ingratitude, answers, ‘With fat.’ So the king is burnt to ashes, and Caruseddu marries the princess. Reinhold Köhler, the learned annotator of Gonzenbach, compares Straparola, iii. 2 (Grimm, ii. 478) and a Wallachian story, where the hero bathes in boiling milk, which his magic horse blows cold, but in which the king himself perishes. Wratislaw gives a curious Servian story from Bosnia, ‘The Bird-catcher’ (No. 42, pp. 239–245). Here the hero, a bird-catcher, is advised by a grateful crow, but the horse comes in very mal-à-propos at the finish. Cf. also Hahn, ii. 180, 186; and Clouston’s Eastern Romances, p. 499, 570.