Note 170.1 — Chapter XXI · THE STORY AS A WHOLE. THE PROBLEM OF ITS PLACE OF ORIGIN. CONCLUSION.

This tale presents more than one point of interest. Save that the brothers are two (instead of three, as in so large a number of European variants), and that the magical weapon is a sword, it bears hardly any material resemblance to Somadeva’s tale. It comprises three out of the four cardinal incidents of the cycle (though the Medusa-witch appears much modified), as well as the secondary incidents of the Gift of Weapons and the Impostor; yet without attaining any very close similarity in the manner of its telling to the European tales. To its most striking peculiarity I have already referred, namely, the incorporation of an incident found in the tale of The Two Brothers. The form of the incident in the Cambodian is obviously much later than in the Egyptian story. The comic scene of the Lady in the gong is a tolerably good guarantee that, by whatever route the incident arrived in Cambodia and became annexed to the tale, it was conveyed not by literary means, but by oral tradition. Other parts of the story betray Indian influence;170.1 but so far as I know, the Lady of the Scented Locks has never yet been discovered in Hindustan. A near kinsman, however, appears in a märchen told by the Santals, where the hero has hair twelve cubits long. He sat down one day to dress it on the river-bank. “In combing his tangled tresses a quantity was wrenched out; this he wrapped up in a leaf and threw into the stream. It was carried by the current a great distance down to where a raja’s daughter and her companions were bathing. The raja’s daughter saw the leaf floating towards her, and ordered one of her attendants to bring it to her. When the leaf was opened it was found to contain hair twelve cubits in length. Immediately after measuring the hair the raja’s daughter complained of fever, and hasted home to her couch.” The long and short of the matter, of course, was that she had fallen in love with the unseen owner of the hair; and her father was compelled to search all over the world for him that she might marry him.170.2 Upon this it is to be observed that the story, of which I have given only a single incident, is, as we should expect, much more savage than the Cambodian tale, and that it could not have influenced the latter. But it points to some such incident as that of the lost lock being, like the lost slipper, part of the story-plasm out of which the folk-tales of the eastern world have been evolved. The special form of the incident in M. Leclère’s tale renders probable its transmission somehow from Egypt—in the absence, that is, of any evidence of a more archaic shape from which alike the Egyptian and the Cambodian incidents with their peculiarities could have been derived. This does not necessarily involve the transmission of the entire story from Egypt, where neither in ancient nor in modern times have we found any variant from which it could have been descended. But it does smooth the way for us to accept the probability that the entire tale was transmitted from the West; and so far as it goes it is evidence against its oriental origin.