The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 1 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 1 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
The tasks of discriminating dam and filly and the root end from the tip
end of a stick, which occur both in the Tibetan tales and the
Shukasaptati, are found again, with unimportant changes, in the
Wallachian popular story, and the Hungarian, which in general resemble
the Arabic. Some of those in the Arabian tale and in the Life of Æsop
are of the same nature as the wit-trials in the Servian and German
popular tales, the story in the Gesta Romanorum, and the German and
English ballads. The wise Heykar, e.g., is required to sew together a
burst mill-stone. He hands the king a pebble, requesting him first to
make an awl, a file, and scissors out of that. The king of Egypt tells
Æsop, the king of Babylon's champion sage, that when his mares hear the
stallions neigh in Babylon, they cast their foal. Æsop's slaves are told
to catch a cat, and are set to scourging it before the Egyptian public.
Great offense is given, on account of the sacred character of the
animal, and complaint is made to the king, who sends for Æsop in a rage.
Æsop says his king has suffered an injury from this cat, for the night
before the cat had killed a fine fighting-cock of his. "Fie, Æsop!" says
the king of Egypt; "how could the cat go from Egypt to Babylon in one
night?" "Why not," replies Æsop, "as well as mares in Egypt hear the
stallions neigh in Babylon and cast their foal?"
The tales in the Shukasaptati and in the Dsanglun represent the object
of the sending of the tasks to be to ascertain whether the king retains
the capable minister through whom he has acquired supremacy. According
to the Arabian tale, and those derived from it, tribute is to be paid by
the king whose riddles are guessed, or by him who fails to guess. This
form of story, though it is a secondary one, is yet by no means late, as
is shown by the anecdote in Plutarch, Septem Sapientum Convivium (6),
itself probably a fragment of such a story, in which the king of the
Æthiops gives a task to Amasis, king of Egypt, with a stake of many
towns and cities. This task is the favorite one of draining [drinking]
all the water in the sea, which we have had in the Servian tale (it also
is in the Life of Æsop), and Bias gives the customary advice for dealing
with it.[20]
From the number of these wise virgins should not be excluded the king's
daughter in the Gesta Romanorum who guesses rightly among the riddles of
the three caskets and marries the emperor's son, though Bassanio has
extinguished her just fame: Madden's Old English Versions, p. 238, No
66; Collier, Shakspere's Library, II, 102.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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