Note 123.1 — Chapter V · THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN SAGAS.

We are not told here whether the blood was human. The analogy of some other sagas, and of several märchen, would lead to the supposition that it must be understood to be a man’s blood. Almost any portion of a man may be possessed of fructifying power. One of the märchen already passed in review attributes it to a man’s heart, and another to the ashes of a burnt skull. A story current among the Serbs is parallel to the latter. The emperor, hunting, finds a skull and causes his horse to step on it. The death’s-head cries out: “Why dost thou tread upon me? I am able to injure thee yet.” The emperor, hearing this, picks it up, burns it and collects the ashes in a casket. His daughter opens the casket and discovers the ashes. To ascertain what the contents of the box are, she wets her finger, dips it in the ashes and licks it. A boy is the result, who after a variety of adventures becomes the founder of Constantinople. This saga is found also in Ukrainia attached to the name of a national hero, Paliq.123.1 As M. Dragomanov, who has brought these Serbian and Ukrainian legends under the notice of Western students, remarks, the tale is found as a märchen in the Turkish Tuti-Nameh, where it appears under the name of “The story of the skull through which eighty persons lost their lives.” There the man who picked up the skull was a merchant; instead of burning it, he ground it to powder; his daughter’s son had a reputation for wisdom, and was called in to say why a fish laughed when the vizier’s over-modest slave-girl refused to look at it, lest it should be a male. The youth, thus called on, reveals to the vizier the presence in his harem of forty men disguised as women, the lovers of his forty slave-girls; and the slaves and their lovers are all put to death, to the number of eighty.124.1 I mentioned in the last chapter a Lithuanian story of a hermit who was burned, all but his heart, which was afterwards eaten by a maiden and caused her to give birth to a son. In a Sicilian legend this holy man is identified with Saint Oniria, or Neria. The maiden’s son is a new birth of the saint, who proves his sanctity when a child of only five years by convincing his grandfather and his mother’s godfather of the salvation of a poor, despised, dead beggar, and the damnation of a wealthy sinner, though borne to his grave upon a costly bier and accompanied by monks with burning tapers, and by revealing the existence of a hoard of gold beneath a dunghill. He is then taken up to heaven, and only appears again to save his grandfather’s life when accused of murder.124.2