Foreword to volume 6

MY own acquaintance with the late Mr C. H. Tawney, around whose translation of Somadeva’s Kathā Sarit Sāgara Mr Penzer is building his volumes, was of the slightest, but from my correspondence with him I was impressed with the same image of modest learning, and a notable personality, which is limned for us by Mr Penzer in the Introduction to the first volume of this series. Forty years ago I acquired, with some difficulty and after a serious inroad upon the contents of a purse but poorly supplied, a copy of the original and only previous edition of Mr Tawney’s translation of what he chose to render as the Ocean of the Streams of Story, in two volumes, printed for him in 1880 and 1884 at the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta. I remember still my joy at the acquisition, and the eagerness with which I turned over the pages and savoured these old, old stories, less wild but even more varied and wonderful than those I had just then finished reading in Forbes’ translation from the Persian of The Adventures of Hatim Taï, another work now hardly accessible outside certain libraries. I found that, as in the twelfth tale of the vetāla (Volume VII), there arose from the Ocean a wishing-tree which was, like the Kalpa tree of Indra’s Paradise, the Granter of Desires, yielding fruit to please all tastes, in tales of kings and courtesans, gamblers and porters, gods and heroes, beggars and barbers, Vidyādharas of supernatural powers and man-devouring Rakṣasas, Nāga serpent-demons and vampires, swan-maidens and witches, of cities and hermitages, paradises and deserts, palaces and hovels, of strange austerities that conquer the very gods, of fleas and elephants, hares and tortoises, of inexhaustible pitchers and poison damsels, of riddles and remedies, and of an infinite number of other interesting matters. The two volumes which are the portals of this world of magic and of mystery are now somewhat scarce, and would, I suppose, be difficult to acquire to-day; they have maintained their pride of place in the folk-tale section of my library and in my memory.

With the present volume, the sixth, Mr Penzer begins the second half of his great task of annotation and revision, but his fourth volume completed the reprint of the first of Mr Tawney’s volumes, of which the second volume is about a tenth longer than the first. Mr Penzer’s new edition is also expanded by the inclusion (in its second half) of valuable appendixes giving long accounts of, and notes upon, those portions of Somadeva’s verses which have appeared separately under the names respectively of the Pañcatantra and Vetāla-pañcaviṃśatī. The index of subjects in Mr Tawney’s second volume is, like those in all old, and I fear I might quite justly add nearly all modern, works of its class, very short (13½ pages of index to 1220 pages of text) and imperfect, so that it is often of small utility in tracing any particular story or incident to which one may desire to refer. The Cambridge Press edition of The Jātaka has endeared itself to scholars by its final volume containing an elaborate index of the whole, and Mr Penzer promises to earn our gratitude in like fashion by a tenth and final volume containing not only a Bibliography but also an exhaustive Cross-Index, which will come as a boon and a blessing to students of comparative storyology, whether like Benfey and the late very erudite Emmanuel Cosquin they believe in the ultimate birthplace in India of the general mass of folk-tales, or whether they regard Indian folk-tales themselves as showing, in some cases at least, signs either of a primitive common origin with European folk-tales or of Western influence or contact, such as, for example, the probable derivation of the vetāla or vampire, to whom relate the last eight stories in the present volume, from Southern Russia and Central Europe, as already suggested by Sir Richard Temple.^[1]

The Forewords to the five earlier volumes have dealt with the Aryan and non-Aryan elements in the tales; with what is known of Somadeva, the composer of The Ocean of Story after the lost Bṛhat Kathā of Guṇādhya, and of his literary sources and the vicissitudes through which the text has passed; with the origin and affinities of the stories themselves, and their diffusion; and with the Persian and Arabic recensions of the Fables of Bidpai. These, and thirteen appendixes already printed, and ranging from “Mythical Beings” to “Umbrellas,” and “Sneezing” to “Widow-Burning,” seem to leave little of a general character to be said, by anyone who is not an Orientalist, which will not find its more appropriate place in an Appendix yet to come or in the Terminal Essay.

For comparative purposes, and as a preliminary step, collections of folk-tales might be divided into two main groups —viz. those having a literary form or dress, and those recorded exactly as taken down from the mouths of the folk. By the former group I do not mean merely the output, so often worthless, of the industrious but unintelligent collector who publishes the naive tales of the peasant or savage tastelessly selected, rearranged, draped, and even, now and then, misfitted with very artificial “morals” duly appended for the instruction of youth and as inappropriate as those invented by the mediæval preachers to “moralise” very similar tales in their exempla. Many a valuable iṅgathering has been utterly spoiled for any use as evidence of diffusion or of origin by such well-meaning but unhallowed blundering, committed on the plea of making the tales suitable for the English nursery. But I have more in mind such publications as the Histoires ou Contes du Tems Passé of Perrault, whose first contes were in verse, like the tales of Somadeva; some have insisted that the boy Perrault fils was the real author and a faithful reporter of his nurse’s stories, and that these were neither rewritten nor edited by his courtier father, the versatile man of letters and sycophant of Le Roi Soleil, but such features as the importation of the supernatural aid of the fairy godmother, found solely in the Perrault version of Cinderella and other tales, and there replacing the dead mother or the helpful beast or tree (which may or may not be a reincarnation of the mother) in most folk versions, seem decisive that Perrault’s is a literary form of the Mārchen, and belongs to the first group. An example of the second group would be the famous Kinder- und Hausmärchen of the Brothers Grimm.

India is exceptionally rich in both groups of publications. In the oral tradition group she has, for instance, Miss Bartle Frere’s Old Deccan Days; Miss Marie Stokes’ Indian Fairy Tales; Sir Richard Temple’s four books (Wideawake Stories, and the three volumes of The Legends of the Pañjāb); the Rev. Charles Swynnerton’s The Adventures of the Pañjāb Hero Rájá Rasdlu and other Folk-Tales of the Pañjāb, and Indian Nights Entertainments; Pandit Natesa Sāstri’s Folk-Lore in Southern India; the Rev. Lai Behari Day’s Folk-Tales of Bengal; and numerous others in English, as well as many translations into other European languages, such as J. P. Minaef’s Indyeishiya skazki i legendui, etc. (an important Russian collection from Kumaon which has not, so far as I know, yet been made available in English). Collections of the first, or literary, group are also, as might be expected from the ancient and unbroken civilisation of India, unusually abundant, in translations of The Jātaka, The Hitopadeśa, The Ṛg-Veda, The Pañcatantra, The Mahäbhārata, The Rāmāyaṇa, etc. The Kathā Sarit Sāgara is probably the most important of all the literary group, and it is hardly necessary to enlarge on Mr Penzer’s service in rendering it again, or perhaps really for the first time, accessible to scholars by his new edition. I may nevertheless permit myself to point out below two directions in which this accessibility may prove of special utility.

One of the many interesting problems in connection with the transmission of folk-tales is the exact part which has been played by literary versions. It is a commonplace to say that folk-tales have passed with changes—now and then becoming “something rich and strange” in the alembic of genius—into literature, and thence they have again descended amongst the common people, the folk, and have been worked over once more by the popular taste and fancy, which have selected what appealed to them, and have effected still further changes and adaptations. In later ages the literary vehicle has probably been the most effective of the means of transmission from people to people, where in earlier ages the captured warrior and wife, the slave passing from hand to hand, and the trader and traveller were the colporteurs of folk-tales to fresh fields and pastures new. The gypsy also has played his part, though he has not yet received the full credit due to him as the spreader of folklore, and it could be shown, if need be, that drolls, or stories with a humorous appeal, have naturally leaped national or racial boundaries more easily than stories depending for their point on custom or belief. Several writers have already pointed out the obvious influence of the wide circulation and popularity of Perrault’s contes upon the genuine Märchen of neighbouring countries, but the general questions of the effects and extent of literary transmission of tales have hardly yet been intensively studied or appreciated, even in the case of the greatest of all literary disseminators, Boccaccio and Straparola. The Kathā Sarit Sāgara will now be available for the study of its relation to popular tradition, and the influence of its contents, chiefly through Persian, Arabian, and sometimes Jewish recensions, upon the folk-tales diffused through the West and reconverted into popular Mārchen by mediæval jongleurs, pilgrims, preachers, merchants and pedlars.

So long ago as 1909, Dr Gaster, in his Presidential Address to the Folk-Lore Society,^[2] suggested that the discarded literature of the classes does not disappear, but filters down slowly to the masses.

“The ancient Romances have thus been turned into Chap-books, which the chapman takes in his sack and carries to the village fair; or they are flattened out still further and they become broadsides, the original of our illustrated sheets and political cartoons. These quaint, peculiar, popular little books of stories are the last representatives of the romances of old.... There can be no doubt that much of the popular literature of to-day—in the widest sense of the word—was the literature of the upper classes of the preceding centuries, remodelled by the people in accordance with the innate instincts and disposition of each nation. The elements surging up from the depth of antiquity meet newer elements coming down from above, and so shape and mould popular taste and popular feeling.”

This suggestion of literary contribution to, as well as literary influence upon the form of, folk-tales did not then receive much attention or support; but with the whirligig of time the opinion of experts has developed more favourably, and now Professor W. R. Halliday maintains^[3] that, in folk literature as handed down by oral tradition, “the amount of invention or original creation is negligible.” He expresses the opinion that “the folk-stories of Europe, as we know them, took their present form between the ninth and thirteenth centuries after Christ”—a period which, it will be observed, includes the probable date of Somadeva’s compilation. In the centuries named, he suggests, a victorious invasion of Europe by Oriental stories took place, which he ascribes to the comparatively higher civilisation of Islam at that date and the high development of the art of story-telling in India. He excepts beast fables from his dictum, and points out, in the course of his argument, that “the coincidences between the popular stories of the classical world and the corpus of Indo-European folk-tales are relatively few.” One may remark, in passing, that many of the classic myths found in the mouths of the people of modern Greece, by Mr J. C. Lawson (Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion) and others, are suspected with good reason of having been taught by the modern schoolmaster, and to have no real roots in the soil or claim to be regarded as “survivals” from ancient times.

This revolutionary theory, which questions and rejects the common assumption of a dateless antiquity for such archaic features as the cannibalism “surviving” in the man-eaters of many European folk-tales (converted by Perrault into ogres and ogresses), is perhaps a little exaggerated in its statement for the sake of emphasising the new views. It does not profess to explain Polynesian and other savage folk-tales in so far as they cannot have been diffused, but confines itself to the bulk of European stories. I think that it would be going much too far to take the folk to be without their fair share of story-telling genius and invention, and the village and kraal to be places “where the Rudyards cease from kipling, and the Haggards ride no more.” The gift of imagination is far from being a monopoly of the literate. Indeed it cannot even be asserted with any confidence that education does not dull, rather than brighten, the creative fire in mediocre minds, and the story-teller who is himself of the folk is the more likely to evolve the tale that will appeal to his neighbours and be preserved in traditional recollection, to become a part of the local folklore. While it may be admitted that the seed of invention must have been born “once upon a time” in an individual brain, it must fall upon good ground in order to bear its fruit in due season as a folk-tale; and the seed varnished by literary skill is for that reason likely perhaps to be preserved for a while longer from Time the devourer, but is also less likely to germinate and more likely to find the ground too stony to cherish it, or to be choked by the thistles of unfriendly folk beliefs. However this may be, Professor Halliday’s theory is entitled to very respectful consideration, and someone much better qualified than myself, and in addition an expert Orientalist, could now very usefully examine Mr Penzer’s presentment of Somadeva’s material, together with its relatives and possible descendants, with a view to using their evidence to throw light upon the very interesting questions raised by Professor Halliday as regards date and derivative relationship.

Professor Minaef, whose translations of Indian folk-tales into Russian, published in St Petersburg in 1877, I have already mentioned, found no professional story-tellers in Kumaon and Gurhwal, but tells us that the greater part of the people do not understand Sanskrit, but nevertheless pay Brāhmans to read the Harivanśā or Bhāvayavata Purāṇa to them on a holiday, and afterwards the reading is explained, “so that the old literary material is constantly making its way into the minds of the people.” The stories, he noted, were sometimes abridged versions of the Pañcatantra.

So much for the first direction in which Mr Penzer’s publication may be opportune and of advantage. The second direction I proposed to mention is that of folk-tale classification. The records of tales have accumulated to such an enormous mass of late years by the industry of multitudinous gatherers that the matter of classification has become one of the most extreme urgency if any use is to be made of the accumulation otherwise than in a very dilettante fashion. I am somewhat inclined to thank Mr Penzer because he has not increased unduly the number of footnotes by performing the easy, if tedious, task of rummaging published collections for the innumerable parallels and variants to Somadeva’s stories. Someone has likened footnotes in general to runaway knocks which call you downstairs for nothing, and the mere piling up of references is less useful than detailed studies of particular points by appendixes or by general notes at the end of individual stories. The majority of the schemes of classification which have hitherto been attempted are purely analytical in character, and dissect the folk-tale into its constituent incidents, so that the result is pretty much what one finds in the gruesome vaults of the Capucin Campo Santo, which is one of the less-known “sights” of Rome and a bonehouse in which all the details of our poor human skeletons are separated from each other and arranged in groups of the corresponding parts from many different bodies—here a neat pattern of knuckle bones, there another fashioned out of tendons, elsewhere thigh bones and skulls, and so on. From such a system of classification may be learned the variations in dimensions of, say, thigh bones, and the limits of such variation, and some other comparative facts of man’s anatomy; but unless one has the imaginative skill of a Richard Owen the mind fails to reach any real conception of the living organism as a whole. Such splitting up of folk-tales into incidents may enable us to distinguish the different elements from old stories put together by what may be called the professional story-teller, who “invents” a new story by shaking up together his favourite stock incidents to form new patterns, just as he might shake the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. But his stories are those least worth classifying, and they might all be thrown into a separate miscellaneous or hybrid class of their own, instead of confusing our vision and hiding from sight the stories that really matter. It seems to me that these analytical schemes of classification have been mooted probably as the result of the classifier’s greater familiarity with modern collections, including examples of the story-tellers’ inventive art,^[4] or with the simple plots of most of the Mārchen of the Brothers Grimm. A more satisfactory plan, in my opinion, would be to found a classification upon the tales in the most ancient records, Sanskrit, Babylonian and Egyptian, and to provide as far as possible for the classification of each tale as a whole, leaving the story-teller’s combinations of old incidents, which cannot sometimes be designated as a whole simply for lack of a dominant motif, to be dealt with in a hybrid or miscellaneous group. To classify according to single incidents, which may have been imported into the main tale, and may not affect its principal course and essential features, is, I think, misleading. For the preparation and testing of a classification the tales of Somadeva’s Ocean would be a really admirable starting-point. It contains few or no tales which are only fresh groupings of trite incidents already used in other connections, and in the process of classification on the same lines of later collections we should be simultaneously arranging our materials for the study of the Ocean as a source and influence. Perhaps Mr Penzer, or another, may be able to give us such a classification in his concluding volume.

Dr Gaster has thrown out the suggestion^[5] that oral popular tales can “all be reduced to a very limited number of types, not exceeding a hundred, and in all probability very much less”; and Dr Joseph Jacobs, in revising a classification of folk-tales made by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould for the first edition of Henderson’s Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties, increased his total number of types to seventy. The latter list, although useful at the date when it was devised, would now need a very large supplement to cover either the Ocean or the recent additions to our knowledge of Indo-European tales, and a still larger supplement to cover all our vast gatherings during the last few years, especially in Africa and Polynesia, and from the Eskimo and Siberian tribes. The seventy types do not even make provision for such well-known stories as the Tar Baby, of which there are many variants, or the Fishing up of Islands by the Mauis.

Previous Forewords have all been written by Oriental scholars, and I hope that it has not been out of place to supplement their criticism and explanations by setting out briefly some of the many grounds for lively gratitude to Mr Penzer on the part of the plain English folklorist, into whose hands have been put the keys of a paradise of delights, with apples of knowledge hung thickly on its trees. Nowadays the folklorist cannot afford to confine himself within any narrow national boundaries. He cannot hope to master more than a few languages and the folklore recorded in them, though a wide knowledge is a necessary equipment for even comprehension of the complex problems of his science, and he must depend for his information very largely on the scholars who translate for him, and especially on those who bring him such gifts as the Ocean in his own vernacular.

I must leave to others the tempting theme of the Ocean as literature, and the love of puns which is a prominent feature of it, and devote the small remainder of my space to a mention of the more important contents of the present volume. It contains the first part of the tales of a vetāla or vampire, of which the framework is the removal of a vampire-animated corpse from its tree by King Trivikramasena and its repeated escape from his back when the king answers the puzzle question put to him by the vetāla at the conclusion of each story of the kind represented in modern literature by Frank Stockton’s The Lady or the Tiger? These tales occupy fifty-seven pages, and Mr Penzer’s very valuable Appendix on The Twenty-five Tales of a Vetāla occupies another seventy pages, and provides a bibliography of the principal recensions, incidentally dealing faithfully with Burton’s well-known Vikram and the Vampire as being more original Burton than translation. Mr Penzer also writes of the necessity of an edition of the numerous versions of the vetāla stories arranged for comparative purposes, and, as these versions are sometimes apparently independent and of various dates down to the Bāitāl Pachīsī, such an edition would be particularly suitable for the examination of literary influence on popular stories which is suggested above. Mr Penzer promises us another Appendix on the vetāla in Volume VII, a large part of which will be filled by the seventeen (or really sixteen) remaining stories of the Vetālapañcaviṃśati. As the material is not yet complete, it would be premature to discuss Mr Penzer’s results.

Beast fables are peculiarly associated with Buddhist writings, if not originating there being often adapted and provided with Buddhist “morals,” and have certainly had a wide diffusion from their Indian home. There are not many of them in the present volume, but there is a good deal about Buddhist doctrine, with references to bodhisattvas and arhats, side by side with tales involving caste, satī, human sacrifice to Durga, and Brāhmanic ceremonies. The comparative date and relation of these different religious elements would repay investigation.

Important notes deal with “Māyā,” “The Magic String,” “The Magic Seed,” “Food Taboos in the Underworld,” and “Vampires,” and few points for useful comment have been overlooked. On page 118 there is mention of Yakṣas “with feet turned the wrong way,” and this curious attribute of supernatural beings, if not already treated in some note in a previous volume, is worth discussion.^[6]

There are many sidelights on Indian ideals, amongst which generosity seems almost as much one of the greatest virtues as with the Yemen Arabs of Hatim Taï, while asceticism is continually set out as the high road to magical power, and gambling and uxoriousness as the downhill paths to ruin. The ups and downs of life under irresponsible rulers are often illustrated, in one tale a thief being appointed at a bound chief magistrate — but of course this might not require him to abandon his profession. There is also the curious suggestion (p. 20) that the last thing seen or dwelt on at the moment of death determines the form taken by the dying creature in its next incarnation.

The general framework of the stories, which is of like kind with that of Le Grand Cyre and other tedious seventeenth-century romances, in which tales revolve one within the other like the multiple perforated balls of the patient Chinese ivory-carver, is obviously of purely literary origin; but in the stories themselves, besides their interest as examples of typical folk-tales, the folklorist will find all manner of material for his use about such things as the magical effect of curses, shape-shifting by witchcraft or charms or the power of an ascetic, foretelling dreams, witches white and black, striking with the hand, magic rings and wishing-trees, and talismans. This store and lore will pleasantly occupy his time and assuage for a while his longing for the remaining volumes of Mr Penzer’s and Mr Tawney’s magnificent work.

A. R. Wright.

16th September 1926.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Vol. I, p. xxv.

[2]:

Folk-Lore, vol. xx (1909), p. 12.

[3]:

“Notes upon Indo-European Folk-Tales and the Problem of their Diffusion,” Folk-Lore, vol. xxxiv (1923), p. 117.

[4]:

Excellent specimens of the story-teller’s recombinations of incidents already known in other arrangements to their audience will be found in Bishop Karekin Servantzdiantz’s Manand and other collections of Armenian stories, which have been translated in part by Mrs J. S. Wiṅgate (Folk-Lore, vols, xxi-xxiii (1910-1912), and M. Macler (Contes Arméniens, Coll. de Contes, etc., tom. xix).

[5]:

Vol. III, Foreword, p. xviii.

[6]:

See Crawford Cree, “Back-footed Beings” Folk-Lore, vol. xvii (1906), p. 131.