Turkish Fairy Tales — Ignácz Kúnos
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : Turkish fairy tales and folk tales Compiler : Ignácz Kúnos Illustrator : Celia Levetus Translator : R. Nisbet Bain Release date : March 13, 2021 [eBook #64807] Most recently updated: October 18, 2024 Language : English Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64807 Credits : Turgut Dincer, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) *** START OF Ignácz Kúnos Translated from the Hungarian version By R.Nisbet.Bain. Illustrated by Celia Levetus London A. H. Bullen 18 Cecil Court, W.C. 1901 PREFACE T HESE stories were collected from the mouths of the Turkish peasantry by the Hungarian savant Dr. Ignatius Kunos, during his travels through Anatolia, [1] and published for the first time in 1889 by the well-known Hungarian Literary Society, “A Kisfaludy Társaság,” under the Title of Török Népmések (“Turkish Folk Tales”), with an introduction by Professor Vámbery. That distinguished Orientalist, certainly the greatest living authority on the primitive culture of the Turko-Tartaric peoples, who is as familiar with Uzbeg epics and Uiguric didactics as with the poetical masterpieces of Western Europe, is enthusiastic in his praises of these folk-tales. He compares the treasures of Turkish folk-lore to precious stones lying neglected in the byways of philology for want of gleaners to gather them in, and he warns the student of ethnology that when once the threatened railroad actually invades the classic land of Anatolia, these naively poetical myths and legends will, infallibly, be the first victims of Western civilization. The almost unique collection of Dr. Ignatius Kunos may therefore be regarded as a brand snatched from the burning; in any case it is an important “find,” as well for the scientific folk-lorist as for the lover of fairy-tales pure and simple. That these stories should contain anything absolutely new is, indeed, too much to expect. Professor Vámbery himself traces affinities between many of them and other purely Oriental stories which form the bases of The Arabian Nights . A few Slavonic and Scandinavian elements are also plainly distinguishable, such, for instance, as that mysterious fowl, the Emerald Anka, obviously no very distant relative of the Bird Mogol and the Bird Zhar, which figure in my Russian Fairy Tales and Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales respectively, while the story of the Enchanted Turban is, in some particulars, curiously like Hans Andersen’s story, The Travelling Companion . Nevertheless, these tales have a character peculiarly their own; above all, they are remarkable for a vivid imaginativeness, a gorgeous play of fancy, compared with which the imagery of the most popular fairy tales of the West seem almost prosaically jejune, and if, as Professor Vámbery suggests, these Népmések provide the sort of entertainment which beguiles the leisure of the Turkish ladies while they sip their mocha and whiff their fragrant narghilies, we cannot but admire the poetical taste and nice discrimination, in this respect, of the harem and the seraglio. I have Englished these tales from the first Hungarian edition, so that this version is, perhaps, open to the objection of being a translation of a translation. Inasmuch, however, as I have followed my text very closely, and having regard to the fact that Hungarian and Turkish are closely cognate dialects (in point of grammatical construction they are practically identical), I do not think they will be found to have lost so very much of their original fragrance and flavour. I have supplemented these purely Turkish with four semi-Turkish tales translated from the original Roumanian of Ispirescu’s Legende sau Basmele Românilorŭ . Bucharest, 1892. This collection, which I commend to the notice of the Folk-Lore Society, is very curious and original, abounding as it does in extraordinarily bizarre and beautiful variants of the best-known fairy tales, a very natural result of the peculiar combination in Roumanian of such heterogeneous elements as Romance, Slavonic, Magyar, and Turkish. R. Nisbet Bain. July 1896 CONTENTS PAGE THE STAG-PRINCE 1 THE THREE ORANGE-PERIS 12 THE ROSE-BEAUTY 30 MAD MEHMED 42 THE GOLDEN-HAIRED CHILDREN 53 THE HORSE-DEVIL AND THE WITCH 74 THE CINDER-YOUTH 84 THE PIECE OF LIVER 97 THE MAGIC TURBAN, THE MAGIC WHIP, AND THE MAGIC CARPET 102 THE WIND-DEMON 112 THE CROW-PERI 134 THE FORTY PRINCES AND THE SEVEN-HEADED DRAGON 143 THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTEOUS DAMSEL 154 THE PADISHAH OF THE FORTY PERIS 166 THE SERPENT-PERI AND THE MAGIC MIRROR 176 STONE-PATIENCE AND KNIFE-PATIENCE 188 THE GHOST OF THE SPRING AND THE SHREW 196 ROUMANIAN FAIRY TALES PAGE THE STORY OF THE HALF-MAN-RIDING-ON-THE-WORSE-HALF-OF-A-LAME-HORSE 209 THE ENCHANTED HOG 222 BOY-BEAUTIFUL, THE GOLDEN APPLES, AND THE WERE-WOLF 244 YOUTH WITHOUT AGE, AND LIFE WITHOUT DEATH 260 TURKISH FAIRY TALES THE STAG-PRINCE Once upon a time, when the servants of Allah were many, there lived a Padishah [2] who had one son and one daughter. The Padishah grew old, his time came, and he died; his son ruled in his stead, and he had not ruled very long before he had squandered away his whole inheritance. One day he said to his sister: “Little sister! all our money is spent. If people were to hear that we had nothing left they would drive us out of doors, and we should never be able to look our fellow-men in the face again. Far better, therefore, if we depart and take up our abode elsewhere.” So they tied together the little they had left, and then the brother and sister quitted their father’s palace in the night-time, and wandered forth into the