Note 31 — INTRODUCTION.

In some of the European variants, the original idea having apparently been forgotten, the transformation appears not only grotesque but unreasonable. Thus in a Wallachian tale (Schott, No. 23), a princess is married to “a pumpkin,” or at least to a youth who is a pumpkin by day. Wishing to improve her husband, she one day puts him in the oven and bakes him, whereupon he disappears for ever. In a German story (Grimm, No. 127), a princess who has lost her way in a wood is induced to marry an iron stove. But the disfiguring “husk” is in most cases the hide or skin of some inferior animal, an ass, a monkey, a frog, or the like, or else the outside of a hideous man. Sometimes it is a brilliant female being who is after this fashion “translated.” Thus an Indian story31 tells of a prince who was obliged to take a monkey as his wife. But when she liked she could slip out of her monkey skin and appear as a beautiful woman arrayed in the most magnificent apparel. She adjured her husband to take great care of her “husk” during her absence from it. But one day he burnt it, hoping to force her to be always beautiful. She shrieked “I burn!” and disappeared. In a Russian variant of the same story a prince is compelled to marry a frog, which is “held in a bowl” while the marriage service is being performed. But when it so pleases her, his frog-wife “flings off her skin and becomes a fair maiden.” One day he burns her “husk,” and she disappears. In the Tibetan story of Kuśa, the “Beast” is merely an ugly man disfigured by “the eighteen signs of uncomeliness.”32 On that account it was decided that “he must never be allowed to approach his wife by daylight.” But she caught sight of him one day, and her suspicions were aroused. So she hid away a lighted lamp in her room, uncovered it suddenly when her husband was with her, shrieked out that he was a demon, and fled away. After a time, however, won by his military reputation, she said to herself, “As this youth Kuśa is excellently endowed with boldness and courage, why should I dislike him?” And straightway “she took a liking for him,” just as the Beauty of the fairy-tale did for the Beast. It may be worth noticing that the conch-shell which Kuśa sounds with such force that the ears of his enemies are shattered, and they are either killed or put to flight, finds a Russian parallel in the whistle employed by the brigand Solovei, or Nightingale, whom Ilya of Murom overcomes. In the builmas, or Russian metrical romances, he often figures; and when he sounds his whistle his enemies fall to the ground, nearly or quite dead.