Vetāla 8: The Three Fastidious Men

Click the link to jump directly to the english translation of the eighth Vetāla. This page only contains the notes.

In the Hindi version{GL_NOTE::} the story is No. 23. Here a Brāhman named Gobind has four sons, the eldest of whom dies. In despair Gobind determines to perform acts of charity and devotion. Accordingly he asks his sons to fetch him a tortoise for his first sacrifice. They tip a fisherman to get one, but find they cannot bring themselves to touch it. A quarrel ensues, and the brothers are taken before the king for him to decide which is the most dainty and fastidious. The rest follows as in our tale.

In the Tamil version{GL_NOTE::} the story is No. 3. It is much curtailed and begins very abruptly. There are just two points worth mentioning. The king, not being a Brāhman, orders the food test to be held in a Brāhman’s house, and a report to be made to him later. The second man sleeps on a bed stuffed with flowers deprived of their stalks. He is sore all over his body in the morning, and a hair is found amongst the flowers. Babington’s modesty forced him to omit any mention of the gentleman who specialised in women!

The story contains two distinct motifs, which will have to be considered separately.

The first concerns the gift of being able to discover the fundamental origin of a thing merely by eating, smelling, drinking it, etc. This merges into another form of the motif, in which the process of “deduction” plays the principal part. It is not easy to find a term to cover both varieties, but I shall deal with them under the common title of “Quintessence” motif.{GL_NOTE::}

The second is concerned with the hypersensitiveness of people, often occasioned by luxurious living. This I shall call the “Sybarite” motif.

It will be seen at once that in the tale under discussion the first two brothers qualify for the “Quintessence” and the last one for the “Sybarite” motif.

In Vetāla 11 (see Appendix to Volume VII) we shall meet three very sensitive ladies who also come under the “Sybarite” motif.

 

The “Quintessence” Motif

In our present text we read that the first brother cannot eat the food offered him by the king as he perceives in it an evil smell of the reek from corpses. It transpires that the food had been made from rice grown near a burning- ghāt. The second brother notices the smell of a goat coming from the beautiful lady of the court. It is proved later that in childhood she had been separated from her mother and nurse, and had been brought up on goat’s milk.

Both the above incidents have found their way into similar stories all over the East, and have gradually migrated westwards. After being included by the great Arabian historians, Mas‘ūdī and Ṭabarī, the story appeared in the Nights, in two different versions. In “The Tale of the King who Kenned the Quintessence of Things”{GL_NOTE::} (Burton, Supp., vol. i, pp. 215-217) the old king judges between two pearls, and says that one must contain a teredo, or boring-worm. He then shows himself a wonderful judge of horses, and finally accuses the king of being the son of a baker. Everything proves to be correct. All the above are examples of the “deduction” variety of the motif under consideration. In “The Story of the Sultan of Al-Yaman and his Three Sons” (Nights, Burton, Supp., vol. iv, p. 1 et seq.) we first of all have the well-known lost-camel incident, in which the three men deduct the exact appearance of the animal, what it was carrying, etc. Arrived at the king’s court, one of them notices that a cake has been baked by a woman who was unwell, the second that the taste of a bit of kid proves that it has been suckled by a bitch, and the third that the sultan must be a bastard. All turn out to be correct. These two examples from the Nights may be taken as typical of that great mass of stories on the same subject found so widely spread in both East and West.

The largest list of analogues is probably that given by Chauvin{GL_NOTE::} to the tale of the Sultan of Yemen. After dealing with the Persian and Arabian versions, he gives references to Indian, Jewish, Greek, French, Danish, Russian and other versions. In dealing with the Chevalier de Mailli’s version of the three princes of Serendip, Fischer and Bolte{GL_NOTE::} give many useful references. In this tale, after the lost-camel incident, the three princes are sitting at the table of the Emperor Behram, eating a leg of mutton and drinking some excellent wine. The eldest maintains that the wine was made of grapes that grew in a cemetery, the second that the lamb was brought up on dog’s milk, and the third says that the emperor had put the wazir’s son to death, and that the wazir now planned vengeance. All the statements turn out to be well grounded.

With regard to the lost-camel incident, apart from analogues to be found in the references already given, Clouston{GL_NOTE::} gives a version from the Tamil Alakēsa Kathā, and Gaster records an interesting Jewish version.{GL_NOTE::} It is as follows:

Two Jews were carried away captive from Mount Carmel.

The captor following them overheard one saying to the other:

“A she-camel has passed before us, she is blind of one eye and on one side she carries wine and on the other vinegar, and two men lead her, the one a heathen and the other a Jew.”

The captor said:

“O ye sons of ‘a stiff-necked people, whence do ye know that?”

They replied:

“We recognise a she-camel by the footprints, the blindness because she feeds only off grass on one side of the road, the wine dropping down has soaked into the earth, the vinegar makes bubbles, and the heathen is not so careful in his manners as the Jew.”

The captor ran after them and found the words true. Walking farther they said:

“We smell the pots boiling four hundred miles off in Judæa.”

He replied:

“You are too clever for me, your god cannot stand you and how can I?”

He brought them home and his mother killed a she-lamb and placed it before them and gave them wine to drink.

One said to the other:

“This flesh smells of the dog and the wine of the corpse.”

The man asked his mother, who explained that the lamb had been suckled by a bitch and the vine had grown on the grave of his father. After they had eaten, the man began to dance and they said:

“That is an illegitimate child.”

He frightened his mother and she owned that she had once made a mistake with a dancer, and then he came back and said unto them:

“Blessed is the Lord Who has selected the seed of Abraham and has given them of his wisdom. Wherever you go you will be the masters of your master.”

And he gave them gifts and set them free, and they returned to their own country.

Reference should be made to pages 195 and 196, where twelve other Jewish references are added, as well as a long list from other parts of the world. Dr Gaster also gives a “quintessence” story on page 138, with numerous analogues on page 251.

Nearly all the above-mentioned lists include the decisions of Hamlet in Sacco Grammaticus.{GL_NOTE::} Here the bread tastes of blood (the corn had been grown on a battle-field), the drink tastes of iron (the malt was mixed with water taken from a well in which some rusty swords had lain), the bacon tastes of corpses (the pig had eaten a corpse), and, finally, the king is a servant and his wife a serving-maid.

 

The “Sybarite” Motif

We now come to the man who was fastidious about beds, and who had so tender a skin that a hair marked his body through seven mattresses. Readers will at once think of Andersen’s well-known story “The Princess on the Pea.”

So far from passing over it with a mere reference, I shall not only give a new translation of the tale from the first edition, but will make its occurrence here an excuse for saying a few words about Andersen himself, and drawing attention to the complete absence of any scientific research on his stories in the English language, or even of a reliable translation of his work. The following is a literal rendering of the story in question.{GL_NOTE::}

There was once a prince; he wanted to marry a princess, but it must be a reed princess. So he travelled round the whole world to find one, but everywhere there was something wrong. There were plenty of princesses, but whether they were real princesses he could not find out: there was always something that was not quite right. Then he came home again and was so sad, because he did so wish to have a real princess.

One evening a terrific storm came on; it lightened and thundered; the rain poured down; it was quite dreadful! Then there was a knock at the town gate, and the old king went out to open it.

It was a princess who was standing outside. But, lord, how she looked, from the rain and the bad weather! The water ran down from her hair and clothes, and it ran in at the points of her shoes and out by the heels; and yet she said that she was a real princess.

“Yes, that we shall soon find out!” thought the old queen, but she did not say anything, went into the bedroom, took off all the bedclothes, and put a pea on the bottom of the bed; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on top of the pea, and then another twenty eiderdowns on top of the mattresses.

There the princess was to lie during the night.

In the morning they asked her how she had slept.

“Oh, dreadfully badly!” said the princess.

“I have scarcely closed my eyes all night long. God knows what there was in the bed! I have been lying on something hard, so I am quite black and blue all over my body! It is quite dreadful!”

Now they could see that she was a real princess, as she had felt the pea through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eiderdowns. Nobody but a real princess could be so tender-skinned.

The prince then made her his wife, because now he knew that he had a real princess, and the pea was put in the museum, where it is still to be seen, unless somebody has taken it.

Now, this is a real story!

“Prindsessen paa ærten” was one of the first four tales published by Andersen. The other three were to become equally famous: “The Tinderbox,” “Little Claus and Big Claus,” and “Little Ida’s Flowers.” These appeared in 1835 under the title of Eventyr fortalte for Born, or Stories for Children. The book contained sixty-one pages, and was only a small edition, the price being four skilling, or about fourpence-halfpenny. The simple style and naīveté of the stories was specially chosen to resemble oral diction rather than the written story.{GL_NOTE::} At first critics were very hard on Andersen —none more so, perhaps, than Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the greatest critic in Northern Europe of that day. It is, therefore, interesting to recall that it was he who, after reading the “Princess on the Pea,” declared that at last Andersen had struck into the road that led to immortality.

In later years Andersen explained that he had heard some of the earlier tales (amongst others, the “Princess”) as a child in the spinning-room of the workhouse of his native Odense, or during hop-picking in the neighbourhood of Odense, where his mother had once taken him. This statement, however, although made by Andersen himself, has received little credence by Danish authorities. Thus G. Christensen{GL_NOTE::} points out that even if the story of the pea did exist in a Danish version, it certainly was not known among the class of people Andersen refers to. Much more likely it was told him by his father, who read him so many stories from both Eastern and European collections. It was not until the end of his life that Andersen turned his attention seriously to Oriental tales. He was especially interested in Pilpay, and his deathbed was strewn with translations and commentaries of his earlier fellow-craftsman.

“Prindsessen paa ærten” has been traced to a Swedish story, the first part of which it closely resembles. It comes from Vestergotland, and is entitled “Prinsessan som låg på sju ärter.”{GL_NOTE::} The tale begins exactly as in Andersen, but the queen subjects the princess to several tests, one of which is the bed episode. She makes the bed with seven mattresses and puts a pea between each of them. The princess sleeps in perfect comfort, but her companion, a wise dog, advises her to complain of great discomfort. This she accordingly does, and all is well. Here, then, we are bordering on the great “helpful animals” motif, with which we are already acquainted.

Now the “bed test” incident is well known in Sweden, and occurs in other earlier collections, but always in conjunction with some animal, usually a cat, and so we come to our old friend “puss-in-boots.”{GL_NOTE::} Perhaps the best known of these stories in Sweden is Grundtvig, No. 43, “Katteprinsen.” This “Herreper” story, as it is called, appears in numerous forms. Thus Hyltén-Cavallius{GL_NOTE::} quotes a large number, over half of which contain the “bed test.” The usual incidents are as follows. A crofter’s (or farmer’s) daughter leaves her home with a cat and dog, and duly arrives at the king’s court. In order to discover if she is really of royal descent, as she declares, she has to submit to three tests, which vary in the different versions. They are, however, all connected with objects placed in the bed. In one version the articles on successive nights are beans, peas and straw. In a version from Uppland they are an apple, a nut and a pea. In one from Vestergotland there are gravel, peas and grain. In another Uppland variant they have become peas, grain and pin-heads. In a South-West Finland version there are peas, knitting-needles and a lump of peat.

The “Princess on the Pea” also found its way to Germany, and was included by the brothers Grimm in their edition of 1843 (No. 182), under the title “Die Erbsenprobe.”{GL_NOTE::} All the charm of Andersen’s story has disappeared, such a delicate theme fitting uneasily into a German märchen, and at once betraying its foreign origin. In fact, Grimm left it out in all subsequent editions, realising it was merely Andersen’s tale retold.

There is, however, another German story{GL_NOTE::} called “Erbsen-finder,” in which a poor boy, in reality owning but a single pea, makes himself out to the king to be possessed of great wealth. In order to test the truth of his story he is made to sleep on a bed of straw. During the night the boy loses his pea among the straw and the noise he makes in searching for it is mistaken by the listening servants as a proof of his claim to wealth, as no rich person could possibly lie peacefully on such an uncomfortable bed. The story is also found in several other European collections.{GL_NOTE::}

And here arises an interesting question. Certainly the story is as un-Germanic as any story could be, but so also is it un-European. Why did it appeal to the Swedes so much, and by what route did it reach them? As Christensen has already stated, the route would in all probability be the one by which so many Oriental tales have travelled to Scandinavia —namely, via Greece, Tyrol, Huṅgary and Saxony. The nature of the tale is not such as would appeal to the hardier races of a colder clime, especially the Teutons. But the Swedes possess a highly developed sense of humour and imagination, and such a tale would be much more likely to find immediate acceptance. We should remember that it was the Swedes who adopted Oriental massage more than any other European nation. There may be a connection.

It was by pure chance that the tale became so well known in Denmark. This was entirely due to Andersen, who picked out the “pea” incident from Swedish tales he had heard in his childhood. I do not suppose for a moment he had the least idea it was an Oriental story dating back to perhaps the beginning of the Christian era.

As already stated, I shall deal further with the “Sybarite” motif in Vol. VII. Here I have confined my remarks to the “bed” incident.

Before leaving Andersen I would like to draw attention to the lack of any scholarly work in the English language either on the man himself or on his stories. There is not even a complete and accurate translation. The best English one which has appeared so far is undoubtedly that by H. L. Brækstad, with an introduction by Edmund Gosse, and excellent Danish illustrations by Hans Tegner (2 vols., London, 1900-1901). The most complete English translation is that by W. A. and J. K. Craigie, issued in 1914 by the Oxford University Press. As the translators are good Danish scholars, it was disappointing to find that most of the old mistakes had been faithfully copied, and in many cases the bad work of Mrs Pauli, Miss Peachey, etc., had been reproduced nearly verbatim. England is far from being alone in its neglect of one of the world’s greatest story-tellers; in fact, it is only quite recently that the Danes themselves have begun scientific research on the tales. See H. Schwanenflügel, Hans Christian Andersen. Et Digterliv, Copenhagen, 1905, and Hans Brix, H. C. Andersen og hans Eventyr, Copenhagen, 1907. Some of Brix’s theories were opposed ex officio by Valdemar Vedel, whose criticisms were published as an article in the Tilskueren, 1907, pp. 494-502, under the title, “Den Andersenske Eventyrdigtning: H. Brix: H. C. Andersen og hans Eventyr,” and should be read in connection with Hans Brix’s book. At the Hans Andersen Exhibition in Berlin, 1925, Professor Vedel read a very interesting paper on “H. C. Andersen’s Eventyr i europæisk Belysning” (published in Tilskueren, 1926, p. 43 et seq.). Other useful references are P. V. Rubow’s “lde og Form i H. C. Andersen’s Eventyr,” Den Nye Litteratur, 1925, pp. 185, 214, 237 and 270; K. Larsen’s H. C. Andersen i Tekst og Billeder, Copenhagen, 1925, and V. A. Schmitz’s H. C. Andersen's Màrchendichtung. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte d. dàn. Spàtromantik, Nordische Studien, vii, Greifswald, 1925.

We now turn to another story of a “bed” sybarite, which appears to be based on historic facts. It is recorded both by Ṭabarī{GL_NOTE::} and Mas‘ūdī.{GL_NOTE::} I take the following account from the former historian, who gives us considerably more details than Mas‘ūdī.

Shapur I, King of Persia (a.d. 240-271), had been besieging the fortress of el-Hadr (Hatra) for four years. All his efforts proved futile. One day Nadhira, the beautiful daughter of Daïzen, the besieged king, caught sight of Shapur and fell violently in love with him. On his promising to marry her, she told him the only, and most curious, way in which the fortress could be taken. Accordingly, el-Hadr was razed to the ground, and Shapur kept his promise.{GL_NOTE::} One night they slept on a bed composed of ten Chinese silk mattresses, but Nadhira complained it was so hard that she was in constant pain all night. In the morning Shapur examined her, and discovered that both she and the bed were soaked in blood. A rose-leaf had pressed against her side and had rubbed her skin till the bones showed! On being questioned as to her upbringing, Nadhira said she had been nourished on cakes made of marrow-fat, butter, honey and flour. She had never eaten bread and had drunk only wine all her life. At this Shapur grew angry. “As you have betrayed your father, who brought you up in this way, and have shown him no gratitude, nobody can rely on you.” So he had her tied by the hair to a horse and cut to pieces on the stones.

Princess Nadhira and the rose-leaf finds her equal in Smindyrides, the Sybarite. Herodotus and several other classical writers{GL_NOTE::} tell how this man even outdid the Sybarites themselves in luxury. Once he chose to sleep on a bed of roses, but he passed a miserable night on such a hard couch! In the morning his body was covered with blisters.

In conclusion I would mention the test of the tutors in the introduction to the Seven Sages of Rome. In order to see how their pupil had progressed in general science, they secretly placed four ivy leaves{GL_NOTE::} under each post of his bed. On awaking in the morning, he surveyed the room with astonishment{GL_NOTE::}:

“Par fay!” he said,

“a ferli{GL_NOTE::} cas!
Other ich am of wine drunk,
Other the firmament is sunk,
Other wexen is the ground{GL_NOTE::}
The thickness of four leaves round!
So much, to-night, higher I lay,
Certes, than yesterday.”