Note 12 — Chapter VIII · WELSH-GYPSY STORIES

This version is markedly inferior to our Welsh-Gypsy one; still, I know in all folklore of few closer parallels. And the two versions are separated by over four centuries and by more than a thousand miles. The ball of yarn on p. 221 recurs in two other Welsh-Gypsy stories, ‘The Black Dog of the Wild Forest’ (‘You follow this ball of worsted. Now it will take you right straight to a river’) and ‘The Green Man of Noman’s Land’ (‘She … gives him a ball of thread to place between the horse’s ears’). In Dasent’s Norse tale of ‘The Golden Palace that hung in the Air’ (Tales from the Fjeld, p. 291) an old hag gives the hero ‘a grey ball of wool, which he had only to roll on before him and he would come to whatever place he wished.’ In Addy’s Household Tales, p. 50, there is a curious but poorly told story from Wensley in Derbyshire, ‘The Little Red Hairy Man,’ a variant of our ‘Mare’s Son’ (No. 20) and ‘Twopence-halfpenny’ (No. 58). Here the little man throws ‘a small copper ball on the ground, and it rolled away, and Jack followed it until it came to a castle made of copper, and flew against the door.’ So with a silver ball and a silver castle, and a golden ball and a golden castle. On which it is just worth remarking that underground castles of copper, silver, and gold occur in No. 58, p. 245, in a story told to Campbell of Islay by a London Gypsy (Tales of the West Highlands, iv. 143), and in Ralston’s The Norka, pp. 75–76. In Wratislaw’s Hungarian-Slovenish story of ‘The Three Lemons,’ p. 63,12 we find castles of lead, silver, and gold, and at each the hero gets dumplings of the same metals, which he afterwards throws before him, when they fix themselves on the glass hill, and permit him to ascend (cf. too, our ‘Three Dragons,’ pp. 152–4; Irish folk-tale in Folk-lore Journal, i. 318; and Folk lore for December 1890, p. 495). In Hahn’s ‘Filek-Zelebi’ (No. 73, ii. 69) the heroine has to follow three golden apples; and in ‘The Wicked Queens’ (J. H. Knowles’s Folk-tales of Kashmir, p. 401) a jogi gives a boy a pebble, telling him to ‘throw it on before and to follow its leadings.’