Gypsy folk tales

Capítulo 1

1899

‘PAZORRHUS’

I am no folklorist; I have merely dabbled in folklore as a branch of

the great Egyptian Question, which includes also intricate problems of

philology, ethnology, craniology, archæology, history, music, and what

not besides. But for twenty years I have been trying to interest

folklorists in Gypsy folk-tales. Vainly so far; and during those twenty

years there have died Dr. Paspati, Dr. Barbu Constantinescu, Dr. Franz

von Miklosich, Dr. Isidore Kopernicki, M. Paul Bataillard, and John

Roberts, the Welsh-Gypsy harper: with them much has perished that

folklorists should not have willingly let go. Meanwhile, however, a

Rómani Grimm has arisen in Mr. John Sampson, the librarian of

University College, Liverpool. With unparalleled generosity he has

placed his collections at my free disposal—I trust I have not made too

lavish use of them,—and has read, moreover, every page of the proofs of

this volume, enriching it from the depths of his knowledge of ‘matters

of Egypt.’ Another, a very old friend, to whom my debt is great, is the

Rev. Thomas Davidson, author of the admirable folklore articles in

Chamber’s Encyclopædia; he has lent me scores of scarce works from his

unrivalled folklore library. Others to whom I owe acknowledgments are:

Mr. Tom Taylor, Mr. W. R. S. Ralston, Mr. W. A. Clouston, Dr. Hyde

Clarke, Professor Bensly (all five also dead), Mrs. Gomme, Mr. H.

Browne of Bucharest, Mr. Robert Burns, Lord Archibald Campbell, Mr.

Archibald Constable, Mr. H. T. Crofton, Professor Dobschütz of Jena,

Mr. Fitzedward Hall, Dean Kitchin, Mr. William Larminie, Mr. David

MacRitchie, M. Omont of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Dr. David Patrick,

Dr. Fearon Ranking, Mr. Rufus B. Richardson of Athens, Professor Sayce,

and Dr. Rudolf von Sowa of Brünn. And, finally, I would thank in

advance whoever may send me corrections, additions, or suggestions on

the subject of Gypsy folk-tales.

FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.

137 Warrender Park Road,

Edinburgh.

TO

MM. COSQUIN, CLODD, JACOBS, AND LANG

AND THEIR FELLOW-FOLKLORISTS

THIS BOOK IS

RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED

INTRODUCTION

Distribution of Gypsies.

No race is more widely scattered over the earth’s surface than the

Gypsies; the very Jews are less ubiquitous. Go where one will in

Europe, one comes upon Gypsies everywhere—from Finland to Sicily, from

the shores of the Bosporus to the Atlantic seaboard. Something under a

million is their probable number in Europe; of these Hungary claims

275,000, Roumania 200,000, Servia 38,000, and Bulgaria 52,000. How many

Gypsies there are in Great Britain I have not the vaguest notion, for

there are no statistics of the slightest value to go by. [1] But I have

never lived for any length of time in any place—and I have stayed in

most parts of both England and Scotland—without lighting sooner or

later on nomadic or house-dwelling Gypsies. London and all round

London, the whole Thames valley as high at least as Oxford, the Black

Country, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, and Yarmouth, it is here I

should chiefly look for settled Gypsies. Whilst from study of parish

registers, local histories, and suchlike, and from my own knowledge, I

doubt if there is the parish between Land’s End and John o’ Groats

where Gypsies have not pitched their camp some time or other in the

course of the last four centuries.

Asia has untold thousands of these wanderers, in Anatolia, Syria,

Armenia, Persia, Turkestan, and Siberia, perhaps also India and China;

so, too, has Africa, in Egypt, Algeria, Darfûr, and Kordofan. We find

them in both the Americas, from Pictou in Canada to Rio in Brazil; nor

are New Zealand and Australia without at least their isolated bands.

To-day at any rate the sedentary Gypsies must greatly outnumber the

nomadic: in Hungary only 9000, or less than one-thirtieth of the entire

number, are returned as ‘constantly on the move.’ Still the race has

always been largely a migratory race; its wide distribution is due to

bygone migrations. Of these the most important known to us is that of

the first half of the fifteenth century, whose movements have been so

lovingly and laboriously traced by the late M. Paul Bataillard in his

De l’Apparition et de la Dispersion des Bohémiens en Europe (1844),

Nouvelles Recherches (1849), and ‘Immigration of the Gypsies into

Western Europe in the Fifteenth Century’ (Gypsy Lore Journal, April

1889 to January 1890, 101 pages [2]).

Appearance in West.

Late in 1417 a band of ‘Secani’ or Tsigans, 300 in number, besides

children and infants, arrived in Germany ‘from Eastern parts’ or ‘from

Tartary.’ Their presence is first recorded at Lüneburg; and thence they

passed on to Hamburg, Lübeck, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, and

Greifswald. At their head rode a duke and a count, richly dressed, with

silver belts, and leading like nobles dogs of chase; next came a motley

crew afoot; and women and children brought up the rear in waggons. They

bore letters of safe-conduct from princes, one of which from the

Emperor Sigismund they had probably procured that same year at Lindau

on Lake Constance; and they gave out that they were on a seven years’

pilgrimage, imposed by their own bishops as a penance for apostasy from

the Christian faith. They encamped in the fields by night outside the

city walls, and were great thieves, especially the women, ‘wherefore

several were taken and slain.’ In 1418 they are heard of at Leipzig, at

Frankfort-on-Main, and in Switzerland at Zurich, Basel, Berne, and

Soleure: the contemporary Swiss chronicler, Conrad Justinger, speaks of

them as ‘more than two hundred baptized Heathens from Egypt, pitiful,

black, miserable, and unbearable on account of their thefts, for they

stole all they could.’ At Augsburg they passed for exiles from ‘Lesser

Egypt’; at Macon in August 1419 they practised palmistry and

necromancy; and at Sisteron in Provence as ‘Saracens’ they got large

rations from the terrified townsfolk. In 1420 Lord Andreas, Duke of

Little Egypt, and a hundred men, women, and children, came to Deventer

in the Low Countries; and the aldermen had to pay 19 florins 10 placks

for their bread, beer, herrings, and straw, as well as for cleaning out

the barn in which they lay. At Tournay in 1421 ‘Sir Miquiel, Prince of

Latinghem in Egypt,’ received twelve gold pieces, with bread and a

barrel of beer.

At Bologna.

Next the Chronica di Bologna tells how ‘the 18th of July 1422 a duke of

Egypt, Duke Andrew, arrived at Bologna, with women, children, and men

from his own country. There might be a hundred. This duke having denied

the Christian faith, the King of Hungary [the Emperor Sigismund] had

taken possession of his lands and person. Then he told the King that he

wished to return to Christianity, and he had been baptized with about

four thousand men; those who refused baptism were put to death. After

the King of Hungary had thus taken and rebaptized them, he commanded

them to travel about the world for seven years, to go to Rome to see

the pope, and then to return to their own country. When they arrived at

Bologna, they had been journeying for five years, and more than half of

them were dead. They had a mandate from the King of Hungary, the

Emperor, permitting them during these seven years to thieve, wherever

they might go, without being amenable to justice.

‘When they arrived at Bologna, they lodged themselves inside and

outside the Gate of Galiera, and settled themselves under the

porticoes, except the duke, who lodged at the King’s Inn (Albergo del

Re). They remained a fortnight at Bologna. During this time many people

went to see them, on account of the duke’s wife, who, it was said,

could foretell what would happen to a person during his lifetime, as

well as what was interesting in the present, how many children would be

born, and other things. Concerning all which she told truly. And of

those who wished to have their fortunes told, few went to consult

without getting their purse stolen, and the women had pieces of their

dress cut off. The women of the band wandered about the town, seven or

eight together; they entered the houses of the inhabitants, and whilst

they were telling idle tales, some of them laid hold of what was within

their reach. In the same way they visited the shops under the pretext

of buying something, but really to steal. Many thefts were thus

committed at Bologna. So it was cried through the town that no one

should go to see them under a penalty of fifty pounds and

excommunication, for they were the most cunning thieves in all the

world. It was even permitted those who had been robbed by them to rob

them in return to the amount of their losses. In consequence of which

several of the inhabitants of Bologna slipped during the night into a

stable where some of their horses were shut up, and stole the best of

them. The others, wishing to get back their horses, agreed to restore a

great number of the stolen articles. But seeing that there was nothing

more to gain there, they left Bologna and went off towards Rome.

‘Observe that they were the ugliest brood ever seen in this country.

They were lean and black, and they ate like swine. Their women went in

smocks, and wore a pilgrim’s cloak across the shoulder, rings in their

ears, and a long veil on their head. One of them gave birth to a child

in the market-place, and at the end of three days went on to rejoin her

people.’

On 7th August the same band, now swelled to two hundred, arrived at

Forli, where, writes the city chronicler, ‘some [3] said they were from

India.’ The Vatican archives may contain some record of the audience

granted to these strange penitents by Pope Martin v.; all that we know

is that later in the same year the ‘cunning and lazy strange people

called Zigeiner,’ led by Duke Michael, were back in Switzerland with

papal as well as imperial safe-conducts. And next, after a gap of

nearly five years, in the August of 1427 there appeared outside Paris,

then held by the English, a hundred men, women, and children, ‘good

Christians from Lower Egypt, who were headed by a duke, an earl, and

ten other horsemen. They told how the pope, after hearing their

confession, gave them as penance to wander seven years without sleeping

in a bed, and letters enjoining every bishop and mitred abbot to make

them one payment of ten livres tournois.’

At Paris.

The Bourgeois of Paris, whose Journal records this visit with a

Pepys-like fidelity, describes how multitudes ‘came from Paris, from

Sainct Denis, and from the neighbourhood of Paris to see them. And it

is true that the children, boys and girls, were as clever as could be.

And most or nearly all had both ears pierced, and in each ear a silver

ring, or two in each, and they said it was a sign of nobility in their

own country. Item, the men were very black, their hair was frizzled;

the women, the ugliest that could be seen, and the blackest. All had

their faces covered with wounds (toutes avoient le visage deplaié),

hair black as a horse’s tail, for sole dress an old blanket, very

coarse, and fastened on the shoulder by a band of cloth or a cord, and

underneath a shift, for all covering. In short, they were the poorest

creatures ever seen in France in the memory of man. Yet, in spite of

their poverty, there were witches among them who looked into people’s

hands, and told what had happened to them, or would happen, and sowed

discord in several marriages by saying to the husband, “Your wife has

played you false,” or to the wife, “Your husband has played you false.”

And what was worse, whilst they were speaking to folks, by magic or

otherwise, or by the Enemy in Hell, or by dexterity and skill, it was

said they emptied people’s purses and transferred the coin to their

own. But in truth I went there three or four times to speak with them,

yet never perceived that I lost a penny, nor did I ever see them look

into a hand. But people said so everywhere, and it came to the ears of

the Bishop of Paris, who went there, and took with him a Minorite friar

called Little Jacobin. And he, by command of the bishop, made a fine

preaching, excommunicating all who had believed them and shown them

their hands. And they were obliged to depart, and departed on the day

of Our Lady of September, and went away towards Pontoise.’

Three weeks later, at Amiens, Thomas, Earl of Little Egypt, with forty

followers, received pious alms from the mayor and aldermen after

exhibition of the papal letters; and during the next seven years we

find similar scattered bands of Egyptians, Saracens from Egypt, or

Heidens, at Tournai, Utrecht, Arnhem, Bommel, Middelburg, Metz, Leyden,

Frankfort, etc. These, according to M. Bataillard, all belonged to the

original band, some four hundred strong, which split up or reunited as

occasion required, and which had probably started from the Balkan

peninsula. The thirty tented Cingari or Cigäwnär, who encamped near

Ratisbon in 1424 and 1426, seem on the other hand to have belonged to

Hungary. Their leader had also a safe-conduct granted him at Zips on

23rd April 1423 by the Emperor Sigismund, and styling him ‘our faithful

Ladislas, Woiwode of the Cigani’; and they gave out quite a different

reason for their exile, that it was ‘in remembrance of the flight of

our Lord into Egypt.’ The four hundred would-be pioneers, then, sent

forward to spy out the lands of promise on behalf of vast hordes

behind, who in 1438 began to pour over Germany, Italy, and France by

thousands instead of by hundreds, and headed this time by King Zindl.

Spain the Gypsies reached in 1447, Sweden by 1512, and Poland and

Russia about 1501.

In England.

The earliest certain mention of their presence in England is this

chance allusion in A Dyalog of Syr Thomas More, knyght (1529), bk. iii.

ch. xv. In 1514 the king sent the lords to inquire into the death of

Richard Hunne in the Lollards’ Tower, and a witness appeared who owned

to having said ‘that he knew one who could tell who killed Hunne.

“Well,” quoth the Lords, “at the last, yet with much work, we come to

somewhat. But whereby think you that he can tell?” “Nay, forsooth, my

Lord,” quoth he, “it is a woman. I would she were here with your

Lordships now.” “Well,” quoth my Lord, “woman or man is all one. She

shall be had wheresoever she be.” “By my faith, my Lord,” quoth he,

“an’ she were with you, she could tell you wonders, by God. I have wist

her tell many marvellous things ere now.” “Why,” quoth the Lords, “what

have ye heard her tell?” “Forsooth, my Lords,” quoth he, “if a thing

had been stolen, she would have told who had it. And therefore I think

she could as well tell who killed Hunne as who stole a horse.”

“Surely,” said the Lords, “so think we all, I trow. But how could she

tell it—by the Devil?” “Nay, by my troth, I trow,” quoth he, “for I

could never see her use any worse way than looking into one’s hand.”

Therewith the Lords laughed, and asked, “What is she?” “Forsooth, my

Lords,” quoth he, “an Egypcyan, and she was lodged here at Lambeth, but

she is gone over sea now. Howbeit, I trow she be not in her own country

yet, for they say it is a great way hence, and she went over little

more than a month ago.”’

It is quite Shakespearian, this scrap of dialogue; well, that is our

earliest evidence for the presence of Gypsies in England. Eight years

later, in 1522, the churchwardens of Stratton in Cornwall received

twenty pence from the ‘Egypcions’ for the use of the church house; and

some time between 1513 and 1524 Thomas, Earl of Surrey, entertained

‘Gypsions’ at his Suffolk seat, Tendring Hall. For all which, and

eighty more similar notes of much interest, see Mr. H. T. Crofton’s

‘Early Annals of the Gypsies in England’ (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 5–24).

In Scotland.

In Scotland the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer yield this entry:

‘1505, April 22. Item to the Egyptianis be the Kingis command, vij

lib.’; and Gypsies probably were the overliers and masterful beggars

whom an Act of 1449 describes as going about the country with ‘horses,

hunds, and other goods.’ In no other country were the Gypsies better

received than in Scotland, where, on 3rd July 1505, James IV. gave

Anthonius Gagino, Earl of Little Egypt, a letter of commendation to the

King of Denmark; where in 1530 the ‘Egyptianis that dansit before the

king in Halyrudhous’ received forty shillings, and where that same

king, James V., subscribed a writ (February 15, 1540) in favour of

‘oure louit Johnne Faw, lord and erle of Litill Egipt,’ to whose son

and successor, Johnne Wanne, he granted authority to hang and punish

all Egyptians within the realme (May 26, 1540). Exactly when cannot be

fixed, but about or soon after 1559, Sir William Sinclair, the Lord

Justice-General, ‘delivered ane Egyptian from the gibbet in the Burrow

Moore, ready to be strangled, returning from Edinburgh to Roslin, upon

which accoumpt the whole body of gypsies were of old accustomed to

gather in the stanks [marshes] of Roslin every year, where they acted

severall plays, dureing the moneth of May and June. There are two

towers,’ adds Father Richard Augustine Hay in his Genealogie of the

Sainteclaires of Roslin (written 1700; ed. by Maidment, 1835, p. 136),

‘which were allowed them for their residence, the one called Robin

Hood, the other Little John.’ Roslin seems to have been a Patmos of the

race for upwards of fifty years, but in 1623–24 they were hunted out,

and eight of their leaders hanged on the Burgh Muir. Six of those

leaders were Faas; and eleven years before, on 21st August 1612, four

other Egyptians of the same well-known surname had been put on trial as

far north as Scalloway in Shetland. These were ‘Johne Fawe, elder,

callit mekill Johne Faw, Johne Faw, younger, calit Littill Johne Faw,

Katherin Faw, spous to umquhill Murdo Broun, and Agnes Faw, sister to

the said Litill Johne.’ They were indicted for the murder of the said

Murdo Brown, and for theft, sorcery, and fortune-telling, ‘and that

they can help or hinder in the proffeit of the milk of bestiale.’ Three

of them were acquitted; but Katherine, pleading guilty to having slain

her husband with a ‘lang braid knyff,’ was sentenced to be ‘tane to the

Bulwark and cassen over the same in the sey to be drownit to the death,

and dome given thairupone.’ For all which, and a multitude more of most

curious and recondite information, I refer my readers to Mr. David

MacRitchie’s Scottish Gypsies under the Stewarts (Edinb. 1894, 120

pages), which has done for our northern tribes what Mr. Crofton had

done for the southern. Its one omission is this, the earliest mention

of Gypsies in the Highlands, contained in a news-letter from Dundee of

January 1, 1651:—‘There are about an hundred people of severall

nations, call’d heere by the name of Egyptians, which doe att this day

ramble uppe and downe the North Highlands, the cheifest of which are

one Hause and Browne: they are of the same nature with the English

Gypsies, and doe after the same manner cheate and cosen the country’

(C. H. Firth’s Scotland and the Commonwealth, Edinb., Scottish Hist.

Society, 1895, p. 29).

In North America.

As to America it was till recently supposed that there were not, had

never been, any Gypsies there. In ‘The Fortune-teller,’ a story

reprinted in Chambers’s Journal for November 25, 1843, from The Lady’s

Book, an American publication, a Mrs. Somers is made to exclaim, ‘An

English gipsy! Alice, you must be deceived. There never has been a

gipsy in America.’ And, sure enough, the fortune-teller turns out to be

no Gypsy. Nay, in a work so well-informed as Appleton’s American

Cyclopædia (1874), the writer of the article ‘Gipsies’ pronounces it

‘questionable whether a band of genuine Gipsies has ever been in

America.’ Yet in 1665 at Edinburgh the Privy Council gave warrant and

power to George Hutcheson, merchant, and his co-partners to transport

to Jamaica and Barbadoes Egyptians and other loose and dissolute

persons; and on 1st January 1715 nine Border Gypsies, men and women, of

the names of Faa, Stirling, Yorstoun, Finnick (Fenwick), Lindsey, Ross,

and Robertson, were transported by the magistrates of Glasgow to the

Virginia plantations at a cost of thirteen pounds sterling (Gypsy Lore

Journal, ii. 60–62). That is all, or practically all, we know of the

coming of the Gypsies to North America, where, at New York, there were

house-dwelling Gypsies as far back as 1850, and where to-day there must

be hundreds or thousands of the race from England, Scotland, Hungary,

Spain, one knows not whence else besides. Some day somebody will study

them and write about them; meanwhile we have merely stray jottings by

Simson and Leland.

In South America.

For South America our information was, quite recently, even more

meagre. Twenty years ago I just knew from Henry Koster’s Travels in

Brazil (Lond. 1816, p. 399) of the presence of Ciganos there, whom he

described as ‘a people of a brownish cast, with features which resemble

those of white persons, and tall and handsome. They wander from place

to place in parties of men, women, and children, exchanging, buying,

and selling horses, and gold and silver trinkets.... They are said to

be unmindful of all religious observances, and never to hear Mass or

confess their sins. It is likewise said that they never marry out of

their own nation.’ Since then, however, Mello Moraes has published Os

Ciganos no Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1886), which, besides a Rómani

glossary, gives a good historical and statistical account of the

Brazilian Gypsies. They seem to be the descendants of Ciganos

transported from Portugal towards the close of the seventeenth and the

beginning of the eighteenth century. Thus, by a decree of 27th August

1685, the Gypsies were henceforth to be transported to Maranhão,

instead of to Africa; and in 1718, by a decree of 11th April, the

Gypsies were banished from the kingdom to the city of Bahia, special

orders being given to the governor to be diligent in the prohibition of

the language and ‘cant’ (giria), not permitting them to teach it to

their children, that so it might die out. It was about this time,

according to ‘Sr. Pinto Noites, an estimable and venerable Gypsy of

eighty-nine years,’ that his ancestors and kinsfolk arrived at Rio de

Janeiro—nine families transported hither by reason of a robbery imputed

to the Gypsies. The heads of these nine families were João da Costa

Ramos, called João do Reino, with his son, Fernando da Costa Ramos, and

his wife, Dona Eugenia; Luis Rabello de Aragão; one Ricardo Frago, who

went to Minas; Antonio Laço, with his wife, Jacintha Laço; the Count of

Cantanhede; Manoel Cabral and Antonio Curto, who settled in Bahia,

accompanied by daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, as

well as by wife and sons. They applied themselves to metallurgy—were

tinkers, farriers, braziers, and goldsmiths; the women told fortunes

and gave charms to avert the evil eye. In the first half of the

nineteenth century the Brazilian Gypsies seem to have been great

slave-dealers, just as their brethren on this side of the Atlantic have

always been great dealers in horses and asses. We read on p. 40 of

‘M..., afterwards Marquis of B..., belonging to the Bohemian race,

whose immense fortune proceeded from his acting as middleman in the

purchase of slaves for Minas.’ And there are several more indications,

scattered through the book, that the Brazilian nation, from highest to

lowest, must be strongly tinctured with Rómani blood. We know far too

little about the Chinganéros or Montanéros, wandering minstrels of

Venezuela, to identify them more or less vaguely with Gypsies (Gypsy

Lore Journal, i. 306, 373); and a like remark applies, even more

strongly, to the Lowbeys of Gambia, who have been described as the

‘Gypsies of North-West Africa,’ who never intermarry with another race,

and who confine themselves almost exclusively to the making of the

various wooden utensils in use by natives generally (ib. i. 54). Still,

these Lowbeys may be the descendants of Gypsies transported from

Portugal, or of the Basque Gypsies, whole bands of whom so lately as

1802 were caught by night as in a net, huddled on shipboard, and landed

on the coast of Africa (Michel’s Pays Basque, p. 137).

In Australia.

To transportation Australia certainly owed its earliest Gypsies. In

1880, a few months before his death, Tom Taylor wrote to me:—‘The only

Gypsy I ever knew who had travelled among “the people” was one Jones,

who used to drive a knife-grinding wheel at Cambridge. Having “left his

country for his country’s good” in the old transportation days, he had

made his escape from Australia, and, the ship aboard which he had

stowed himself putting into a Spanish port, had landed, met with some

of the Zincali, and travelled with them for some time. He was looked on

as a master of “deep Rommany” among the Gypsies round Cambridge.’ Mr.

MacRitchie has a letter containing a longish list of wealthy Australian

Gypsies, whose grandsires were bitchadé párdel (‘sent over’); yet,

according to the Orange Guardian of May 1866:—‘The first Gypsies seen

in Australia passed through Orange the other day en route for Mudgee.

Although they can scarcely be reckoned new arrivals, as they have been

nearly two years in the colony, they bear about them all the marks of

the Gypsy. The women stick to the old dress, and are still as anxious

as ever to tell fortunes; but they say that this game does not pay in

Australia, as the people are not so credulous here as they are at home.

Old “Brown Joe” is a native of Northumberland, and has made a good deal

of money even during his short sojourn here. They do not offer

themselves generally as fortune-tellers, but, if required and paid,

they will at once “read your palm.” At present they obtain a livelihood

by tinkering and making sealing-wax. Their time during the last week

has been principally taken up in hunting out bees’ nests, which are

very profitable, as they not only sell the honey, but, after purifying

and refining the wax, manufacture it into beautiful toys, so rich in

colour and transparency that it would be almost impossible to guess the

material’ (quoted in Notes and Queries, 28th July 1866, p. 65).

Transportation.

Banishment and transportation have been important factors in the

dispersion of the Gypsies. They were banished from Germany in 1497,

Spain in 1499, France in 1504, England in 1531, Denmark in 1536,

Moravia in 1538, Scotland in 1541, Poland in 1557, Venetia in 1549,

1558, and 1588, etc.; to such banishment is probably due the fact that

in 1564 we find in the Netherlands a Gypsy woman, Katarine Mosroesse,

who had been born in Scotland. Besides the transportation, already

noticed, of Scottish Gypsies to Jamaica, Barbadoes, and Virginia, of

Portuguese Gypsies to Africa and Brazil, of Basque Gypsies to Africa,

and of English Gypsies to Botany Bay, we know that some time prior to

1800 Gitanos were transported from Spain to Louisiana; whilst in 1544

we find one large band of Egyptians being sentenced at Huntingdon to be

taken to Calais, the nearest English port on the Continent, and another

being shipped at Boston in Lincolnshire and landed somewhere in Norway.

In Crete.

From the preceding it may be safely deduced that, with our present

knowledge, or rather lack of knowledge, we can seldom, if ever, fix the

precise date when the Gypsies first set foot in any country. Till 1849

it was almost universally accepted that 1417, the year of their

appearance at the Hanse cities of the Baltic, was also the date of

their first arrival in Europe. But since then Bataillard, Hopf, and

Miklosich have collected a number of passages which prove incontestably

that long before then there must have been Gypsies in south-eastern

Europe. Symon Simeonis, a Minorite friar, who made pilgrimage from

Ireland to the Holy Land, tells in his Itinerarium (Camb. 1778, p. 17),

how in 1322 near Candia in Crete: ‘There also we saw a race outside the

city, following the Greeks’ rite, and asserting themselves to be of the

family of Chaym [Ham]. They rarely or never stop in one place beyond

thirty days, but always wandering and fugitive, as though accursed by

God, after the thirtieth day remove from field to field with their

oblong tents, black and low, like the Arabs’, and from cave to cave.

For after that period any place in which they have dwelt becomes full

of worms and other nastinesses, with which it is impossible to dwell.’

[4]

In Corfu.

The Empress Catherine de Courtenay-Valois (1301–46), granted to the

suzerains of Corfu authority to receive as vassals certain ‘homines

vageniti,’ coming from the Greek mainland, and using the Greek rite. By

the close of the fourteenth century these vageniti were all of them

subject to a single baron, Gianuli de Abitabulo, and formed the nucleus

of a fief called the fief of Abitabulo or feudum Acinganorum, which

lasted under various superiors until the abolition of feudal tenures in

the beginning of the present century. One of those superiors, about

1540, was the learned Antonio Eparco, Melanchthon’s correspondent;

another, the tyrannical Count Teodoro Michele, who died in 1787. This

little Gypsy colony, numbering about a hundred adults, besides

children, had a tax to pay twice a year to their superior, as also such

fines as two gold pieces and a couple of fat hens for permission to

marry. They were mechanics, smiths, tinkers, and husbandmen; celebrated

a great yearly festival on the first of May; and were amenable only to

the jurisdiction of their lord. Carl Hopf, in Die Einwanderung der

Zigeuner in Europa (Gotha, 1870, pp. 17–23), tells us much about them,

collected from the papers of Count Teodoro Trivoli, who succeeded to

the property in 1863. Still we would fain know much more, especially

something as to their language. One point to be noticed is that

Italians must in Corfu have come early in contact with Gypsies, for the

island belonged to Venice from 1401 to 1797.

In the Peloponnesus.

From a Venetian viceroy, moreover, Ottaviano Buono, the Acingani of

Nauplion in the Peloponnesus received about 1398 a confirmation of the

privileges granted them by his predecessors; and Hopf from two facts

infers that Gypsies must have been early settled in the peninsula—one,

the frequency of ruins called Gyphtokastron (‘Gypsy fortress’); the

other, that in 1414 the Byzantine rhetorician Mazaris [5] reckoned

Egyptians as one of the seven races dwelling there. Nauplion is on the

east coast, Modone on the west; and at Modone the Cologne patrician,

Arnold von Harff, who went on pilgrimage 1496–99, found a whole suburb

of ‘poor naked people in little reed-thatched houses, well on to three

hundred families, called Suyginer, the same as those whom we call

Heiden (Heathen) from Egypt, and who wander about in our lands. Here

the race plies all sorts of handiwork—shoemaking, cobbling, and also

the smith’s craft, which is right curious to behold. The anvil stands

on the ground, the man sat in front of it, like a tailor with us; near

him sat his wife, also on the earth, and span. Between them was the

fire. Near it were two little leather bags, like a bagpipe’s, half in

the ground and pointing towards the fire. So the wife, as she sat and

span, sometimes lifted up one of the bags and then pressed it down

again; this sent wind through the earth to the fire, so that the man

could get on with his tinkering.’ Harff then says that the race

originates from a country called Gyppe, some forty miles distant from

Modone. ‘Sixty years ago’ [i.e. about 1436] ‘the Turkish emperor seized

this territory, whereupon some counts and lords, who would not submit

to his authority, fled to Rome to our spiritual father, and demanded

his comfort and succour. So he gave them commendatory letters to the

Roman emperor and to all princes of the empire, to render them conduct

and assistance as exiles for the Christian faith. But though they

showed the letters to all princes, they found nowhere assistance. So

they died in wretchedness, but the letters passed to their servants and

children, who still wander about in our lands, and call themselves from

Little Egypt. But that is a lie, for their parents came from the

territory of Gyppe, called also Suginia, which is not so far from our

city of Cologne as it is from Egypt. But these vagabonds are rascals

and spy out the lands.’ This passage, modernised from Harff’s narrative

by Hopf (pp. 14–17), is of high interest, though there was no Turkish

occupation of the Morea about 1436, and though we know of no territory

there called Gyppe or Suginia.

In Roumania.

In 1387 Mircea I., woiwode of Wallachia, by a charter still preserved

in the archives of Bucharest, renewed a grant made about 1370 by his

uncle Vladislav to the monastery of St Anthony at Voditza of forty

salaschi (‘tents’ or families) of Atsegane. Which shows that already

the Roumanian Gypsies were serfs; and serfs they continued till 1856.

To the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (vol. i., Lond.,

1857, pp. 37–41) Mr. Samuel Gardner, H.M. Consul at Jassy, contributed

some interesting ‘Notes on the Condition of the Gypsy Population of

Moldavia.’ ‘The Tzigans,’ he says, ‘are an intelligent and industrious

race, and in their general condition of prædial slavery (for few are in

reality emancipated) are a reproach to the country and to the

Government. Many of them are taught arts. They are the blacksmiths,

locksmiths, bricklayers, masons, farriers, musicians, and cooks

especially, of the whole country.... They dwell in winter in

subterranean excavations, the roof alone appearing above ground, and in

summer in brown serge tents of their own fabric.... The children, to

the age of ten or twelve, are in a complete state of nudity; but the

men and women, the latter offering frequently the most symmetrical form

and feminine beauty, have a rude clothing. Their implements and

carriages, of a peculiar construction, display much ingenuity. They are

in fact very able artisans and labourers, industrious and active, but

are cruelly and barbarously treated. In the houses of their masters

they are employed in the lowest offices, live in the cellars, have the

lash continually applied to them, and are still subjected to the iron

collar and a kind of spiked iron mask or helmet, which they are obliged

to wear as a mark of punishment and degradation for every petty

offence.’ The Gypsies of Wallachia and Moldavia are referred to in

eleven original documents of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth

centuries. Every one of these documents speaks of them as serfs, but we

get never a hint of when they were first reduced to serfdom.

The Chaltsmide.

In a free metrical paraphrase of Genesis, made in German about or

before the year 1122 by an Austrian monk, and cited by Freytag in

Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (1859, ii. 226), occurs this

passage:—‘So she [Hagar] had this child, they named him Ishmael. From

him are descended the Ishmaelitish folk. They journey far through the

world. We call them chaltsmide [mod. Ger. Kaltschmiede, ‘workers in

cold metal’]. Out upon their life and their manners! For whatever they

have to sell is never without a defect; whenever he buys anything, good

or bad, he always wants something in; he never abates on what he sells

himself. They have neither house nor country; every place is the same

to them. They roam about the land, and abuse the people by their

knaveries. It is thus they deceive folk, robbing no one openly.’ That

here, by chaltsmide, Ishmaelites, and descendants of Hagar Gypsies were

meant, can scarcely admit of doubt. The smith’s is still the Gypsies’

leading handicraft; Lusignan in 1573 says of the Gypsies of Cyprus, [6]

‘Les Cinquanes sont peuple d’Egypte dits autrement Agariens’; Agareni

is one of the numberless names applied to the Gypsies by Fritschius in

1664; and in German and in Danish thieves’ slang Geshmeilim and Smaelem

(Ishmaelites) are terms for Gypsies at the present day. One fancies

that Austrian monk had somehow been ‘done’ by the Chaltsmide.

Athingani.

From whatever cause, it seems certain that a confusion did exist

between the Ἀτσίγκανοι, or Gypsies, and the Ἀθίγγανοι, or heretics

forming a branch of the Manichæan sect of the Paulicians, which renders

it sometimes extremely difficult to determine whom the Byzantine

historians are speaking of in seven passages collected by Dr. Franz von

Miklosich in his great work, Ueber die Mundarten und die Wanderungen

der Zigeuner Europa’s (part vi., 1876, Vienna, pp. 57–64). It appears

from these that the Athingani, described as magicians, soothsayers, and

serpent-charmers, first emerge in Byzantine history under Nicephorus I.

(802–11), were banished by Michael I. (811–13), and were restored to

favour by Michael II. (820–29). But Miklosich’s grounds for absolutely

identifying them with Gypsies, and positively asserting the latter to

have appeared at Byzantium in 810 under Nicephorus, are hard to

recognise.

Atsincan.

Far less dubious seems an extract from the Georgian Life of Giorgi

Mtharsmindel of Mount Athos (St. Petersburg, 1846, p. 241), which was

demonstrably composed in the year 1100. We have two French translations

of that extract—one published by Otto Boehtlingk (Bulletin

historico-philol. de l’Académie de St. Petersbourg, ii. 1853, p. 4),

and the other by Miklosich (loc. cit., part vi. p. 60). Both

translations agree closely; I follow Miklosich’s:—‘Whilst the pious

king, Bagrat IV. [c. 1048], was in the imperial city of Constantinople,

he learnt—a thing marvellous and quite incredible—that there were

certain descendants there of the Samaritan race of Simon Magus, called

Atsincan, wizards and famous rogues. Now there were wild beasts that

used to come and devour the animals kept, for the monarch’s chase, in

the imperial park. The great emperor Monomachus, learning of this, bade

summon the Atsincan, to destroy by their magic art the beasts devouring

his game. They, in obedience to the imperial behest, killed a quantity

of wild beasts. King Bagrat heard of it, and summoning the Atsincan,

said, “How have you killed these beasts?” “Sire,” said they, “our art

teaches us to poison meat, which we put in a place frequented by these

beasts; then climbing a tree, we attract them by imitating the cry of

the animals; they assemble, eat the meat, and drop down dead. Only

beasts born on Holy Saturday obey us not. Instead of eating the

poisoned meat, they say to us, ‘Eat it yourselves’; then off they go

unharmed.” The monarch, wishing to see it with his own eyes, bade them

summon a beast of this sort, but they could find nothing but a dog

which they knew had not been born upon that day. The monk, who was

present with the king, was moved with the same natural sentiment as we

have spoken of above, on the subject of the icons and of the divine

representation. He was moved, not with pity only, but with the fear of

God, and would have no such doings among Christians, above all before

the king, in a place where he was himself. He made the sign of the

cross on the poisoned meat, and the animal had no sooner swallowed it

than it brought it up, and so did not drop dead. The dog having taken

no harm, the baffled wizards begged the king to have the monk, Giorgi,

taken into the inner apartments, and to order another dog to be

brought. The holy monk gone, they brought another dog, and gave him the

poisoned meat: he fell dead instantly. At sight of this King Bagrat and

his lords rejoiced exceedingly, and told the marvel to the pious

emperor, Constantine Monomachus [1042–54], who shared their

satisfaction and thanked God. As to King Bagrat, he said, “With this

holy man near me, I fear neither wizards nor their deadly poisons.”’

That things fell out precisely as here reported is questionable, but

Gypsies are clearly meant by the Atsincan; the passage attests their

existence in Europe in the eleventh century. The poisoning of pigs—for

which compare Borrow’s Romany Rye—has become a lost Gypsy art. But

twenty-five years ago I knew English Gypsies who had a most unpleasant

knowledge of whence to get natural arsenic. One of them dropped down

dead, and the policeman who examined his body found a quantity of it in

his pocket. ‘Oh! yes,’ explained the survivors, ‘he used it, you know,

sir, in his tinkering.’ [7]

Komodromoi.

What it was first directed my attention to the Komodromoi of Byzantine

writers I cannot be positive, but I am pretty sure it was something

somewhere in Pott. Not in any of the 1034 pages of his Zigeuner in

Europa und Asien (2 vols., Halle, 1844–45), for I have once more gone

through that stupendous work, but perhaps in a letter, perhaps in a

conversation, or perhaps in one of his contributions to the Zeitschrift

der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. Anyhow, I am sure no work

hitherto on the Gypsies has cited this extract from Du Cange’s

Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediæ et Infimæ Græcitatis (Paris, 1688):—

‘κωμοδρόμοι, interdum κομοδρόμοι, Circulatores, atque adeò Fabri

ærarij qui per pagos cursitant: ut hodie passim apud nos, quos

Chaudroniers dicimus. Lexicon MS. ad Schedographiam:

Βαβαὶ, θαυμαστικόν ἐστι, Βάναυσος, ὁ χαλκεύς τε,

Καὶ χρυσοχόος, λέγεται, ἀλλὰ καὶ κωμοδρόμος.

Glossæ Græcobarb. Ἀκμὼν, σίδηρον ἐφ’ ᾧ χαλκεὺς χαλκεύει, ἤγουν

ἀκμόνιν ὁπου κομοδρομεύει ὁ κομοδρόμος. Alibi, Ἀκροφύσια, τὰ ἄκρα

τῶν ἀσκῶν, ἐν οἷς οἰ χαλκεῖς τὸ πῦρ ἐκφυσῶσιν· αἱ ἄκραι, ἤγουν ἡ

ἄκρες τῶν ἀσκῶν ἤ ἀσκιῶν, μεθ’ αἷς ὁποίαις φυσοῦσιν οἱ κομοδρόμοι

τὴν φωτίαν. Theophanes, an. 17 Justiniani: τὶς ἐκ τῶν Ἰταλῶν χῶρας

κομοδρόμος,—ἔχων μεθ’ ἑαυτο͂υ κύνα ξανθὸν καὶ τυφλὸν, etc.

Constantinus de Adm. Imp. c. 50, p. 182, καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ θέματος τῶν

Ἀρμενιακῶν εἰς τὸ τοῦ Χαρσιανοῦ θέμα μετέθησαν ταῦτα τὰ βάνδα, ἤτοι

ἡ τοῦ κομοδρόμου τοποτηρεσία Ταβίας, καὶ εἰς τὴν τούρμαν τοῦ

Χαρσιανοῦ τὴν εἰρημένην προσετέθησαν. Anonymus de Passione Domini:

καὶ ὅτε φθάσωσιν εἰς τὸν τόπον, ἐλθὼν ὁ κομοδρόμος ἀς σταυρώσει

αὐτὸν, etc. Occurrit præterea in Annalib. Glycæ.’

Dictionaries are not as a rule lively reading; but every line almost in

this extract has its interest. Komodromos, ‘village-roamer,’ is

certainly a vague term, but no vaguer than landlooper, which does in

Dutch stand for ‘Gypsy,’ as landlouper does for ‘vagrant’ in Lowland

Scotch. Du Cange’s own definition of komodromoi as roamers

(circulatores) and coppersmiths who rove about the country, like those

in our midst whom we call Chaudronniers, must have been meant by him to

apply to Gypsies, and to Gypsies only. The modern Roumanian and

Hungarian Gypsies are divided into certain classes—Caldarari

(chaudronniers or caldron-smiths), Aurari (gold-workers), etc.; and

Bataillard’s note prefixed to most of his monographs runs—‘L’auteur

recevrait avec reconnaissance toute communication relative aux

Bohémiens hongrois voyageant hors de leur pays (vrais nomades pourvus

de tentes et de chariots, la plupart chaudronniers).’ Next, the six

passages quoted by Du Cange show that the komodromos was variously or

conjointly a coppersmith (chalkeus) and a gold-worker (chrysochoos,

defined by Du Cange as ‘aurifer, aurarius’). The Gypsy Aurari have

practised gold-washing in Wallachia and Transylvania from time

immemorial (Grellmann, Die Zigeuner, 2nd ed. 1787, pp. 105–112); but we

have also many indications of the Gypsies as actual goldsmiths. Captain

Newbold says that the Persian Gypsies ‘sometimes practise the art of

the gold and silver smith, and are known to be forgers of the current

coin of Persia. These are the zergars (lit. “workers in gold”) of the

tribe’ (Jour. Roy. Asiatic Soc., vol. xvi. 1856, p. 310). The Egyptian

Gypsies, he tells us, at Cairo ‘carry on the business of tinkers and

blacksmiths, and vend ear-rings, amulets, bracelets, and instruments of

iron and brass’ (ib. p. 292). The Gypsy bronze and brass founders of

Western Galicia and the Bukowina—the only Gypsy metallurgists of whom,

thanks to Kopernicki, we possess really full information—are called

Zlotars and Dzvonkars, Ruthenian words meaning ‘goldsmiths’ and

‘bell-makers.’ They are no longer workers in gold, but they do make

rings, crosses, clasps, ear-rings, etc., of brass and German silver

(Bataillard, Les Zlotars, 1878, 70 pages). Henri van Elven, in ‘The

Gypsies in Belgium’ (Gypsy Lore Journal, ii. 139), says: ‘The women

wear bracelets and large earrings of gold, copper, or bronze, seldom of

silver; while all the Gypsies wear earrings [cf. supra, p. xii.]. It

appears to me that the Gypsy jewels and the metal-work of their pipes

have not yet been sufficiently studied. In the fabrication of these

objects they must have preserved something typical and antique, which

would contribute to the comparative study of their ancient industries.

I remember seeing some rings, cast in bronze, of which the setting was

ornamented with a double or a single cross, and whose ornamentation

recalled the motifs of the Middle Ages, the style being evidently

Oriental. Their walking-sticks are topped with copper or bronze

hatchets, but more frequently with round knobs, which are hollow, and

which hold their money, the lid being screwed off and on. These Gypsies

were tin-workers, repairing metal utensils, and also basket-makers.’

The Gypsies, says Dr. R. W. Felkin, ‘appear to be on friendly terms

with the natives of the country, and curiously enough they are said to

have introduced the art of filigree work and gold-beating into Darfûr’

(‘Central African Gypsies,’ Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 221). Even the

Brazilian Gypsies of 1816, as we have seen from Koster’s Travels, sold

gold and silver trinkets.

The reference to the anvil and to the bellows of skins with which the

komodromoi blew up their furnace recalls the passage cited from Arnold

von Harff on p. xx., where, about 1497, he described the anvil and the

bellows of the Modone Gypsies. Gypsy bellows are figured in

Bataillard’s Les Zlotars, in Van Elven’s article, and in Die Metalle

bei den Naturvölkern of Richard Andree (Leip. 1884, p. 83). Arthur J.

Patterson in The Magyars: their Country and Institutions (1869, ii.

198) writes: ‘A curious consequence of their practising the art of the

smith is that a Gypsy boy is in Hungary called purde, which is

generally supposed to be the equivalent in the Gypsy language for

“boy.” It is really the imperative mood of the verb “to blow,” for,

while the Gypsy father is handling the hammer and the tongs, he makes

his son manage the bellows.’ Small points enough these, but they must

be viewed in relation to the metallurgical monopoly still largely

enjoyed by the Gypsies in south-east Europe and in Asia Minor. So

exclusively was the smith’s a Gypsy (and therefore a degrading) craft

in Montenegro that, when in 1872 the Government established an arsenal

at Rieka, no natives could be found to fill its well-paid posts. And in

a very long letter of 21st January 1880, the late Mr. Hyde Clarke wrote

to me that ‘over more than one sanják of the Aidin viceroyalty the

Gypsies have still a like monopoly of iron-working; the naalband, or

shoeing-smith, being no smith in our sense at all. He is supplied with

shoes of various sizes by the Gypsies, and only hammers them on.’ It is

most unlikely that, if recent comers to the Levant, the Gypsies should

have acquired such a monopoly; it is obvious that, if they possessed

that monopoly a thousand years ago, these komodromoi must have been

Gypsies.

For Du Cange’s first three quotations I can assign no dates, but

Theophanes Isaurus was born in 758 and died in 818; the seventeenth

year of Justinian would be 544 A.D.—a very early date at which to find

a Gypsy from Italy, ‘having with him a blind yellow dog.’ The dates of

the Emperor Constantinus Porphyrogenitus are 905–959; I own I can make

little of this passage from his Liber de administrando Imperio, but

thema, bandon, topoteresia, and tourma seem all to be words for

administrative divisions.

Nails of Crucifixion.

Du Cange’s last passage is by far the most interesting:—‘Anonymus de

Passione Domini: “And when they arrive at the place, the komodromos

coming to crucify him,” etc.’ ‘Why so interesting? there does not seem

much in that,’ my readers may exclaim. Why? because there is a

widely-spread superstition that a Gypsy forged the nails for the

crucifixion, and that henceforth his race has been accursed of heaven.

That superstition was first recorded in an article by Dr. B. Bogisic on

‘Die slavisirten Zigeuner in Montenegro’ (Das Ausland, 25th May 1874);

and in Le Folklore de Lesbos, by G. Georgeakis and Léon Pineau (Paris,

1891, pp. 273–8), is this ‘Chant du Vendredi Saint,’ this plaint of Our

Lady:—

‘Our Lady was in a grotto

And made her prayer.

She hears rolling of thunder,

She sees lightnings,

She hears a great noise.

She goes to the window:

She sees the heaven all black

And the stars veiled:

The bright moon was bathed in blood.

She looks to right, she looks to left:

She perceives St. John;

She sees John coming

In tears and dejection:

He holds a handkerchief spotted with blood.

“Good-day, John. Wherefore

These tears and this dejection?

Has thy Master beaten thee,

Or hast thou lost the Psalter?”

“The Master has not beaten me,

And I have not lost the Psalter.

I have no mouth to tell it thee,

Nor tongue to speak to thee:

And thine heart will be unable to hear me.

These miserable Jews have arrested my Master,

They have arrested him like a thief,

And they are leading him away like a murderer.”

Our Lady, when she heard it,

Fell and swooned.

They sprinkle her from a pitcher of water,

From three bottles of musk,

And from four bottles of rose-water,

Until she comes to herself.

When she was come to herself, she says,

“All you who love Christ and adore him,

Come with me to find him,

Before they kill him,

And before they nail him,

And before they put him to death.

Let Martha, Magdalene, and Mary come,

And the mother of the Forerunner.”

These words were still on her lips,

Lo! five thousand marching in front,

And four thousand following after.

They take the road, the path of the Jews.

No one went near the Jews except the unhappy mother.

The path led them in front of the door of a nail-maker.

She finds the nail-maker with his children,

The nail-maker with his wife.

“Good-day, workman, what art making there?”

“The Jews have ordered nails of me;

They have ordered four of me;

But I, I am making them five.”

“Tell me, tell me, workman,

What they will do with them.”

“They will put two nails in his feet,

Two others in his hands;

And the other, the sharpest,

Will pierce his lung.”

Our Lady, when she heard it,

Fell and swooned.

They sprinkle her from a pitcher of water

From three bottles of musk,

And from four bottles of rose;

Until she comes to herself.

When she had come to herself she says:

“Be accursed, O Tziganes!

May there never be a cinder in your forges,

May there never be bread on your bread-pans,

Nor buttons to your shirts!”

They take the road,’ etc.

And M. Georgeakis adds in a footnote, ‘The Tziganes whom one sees in

the island of Mitylene are all smiths.’ It is a far cry from the Greek

Archipelago to the Highlands of Scotland, but in the Gypsy Lore Journal

(iii. 1892, p. 190), is this brief unsigned note: ‘I should be pleased

to know if you have the tradition in the South [of Scotland], that the

tinkers are descendants of the one who made the nails for the Cross,

and are condemned to wander continually without rest.’ No answer

appeared; and I know of no other hint of the currency of this belief in

Western Europe, unless it be the couplet:—

‘A whistling maid and a crowing hen

Are hateful alike to God and men,’

‘because,’ according to Lieut.-Col. A. Fergusson (Notes and Queries,

August 1879, p. 93), though he gives no authorities, ‘a woman stood by

and whistled while she watched the nails for the Cross being forged.’

[8]

On the other hand, the Gypsies of Alsace have a legend of their own,

opposed to, and probably devised expressly to refute, the gaújo or

Gentile version. How there were two Jew brothers, Schmul and

Rom-Schmul. The first of them exulted at the Crucifixion; the other

would gladly have saved Our Lord from death, and, finding that

impossible, did what he could—pilfered one of the four nails. So it

came about that Christ’s feet must be placed one over the other, and

fastened with a single nail. And Schmul remained a Jew, but Rom-Schmul

turned Christian, and was the founder of the Rómani race (‘Die Zigeuner

in Elsass und in Deutschlothringen,’ by Dr. G. Mühl, in Der Salon,

1874). In a letter of 16th December 1880, M. Bataillard wrote: ‘An

Alsatian Gypsy woman, one of the Reinhart family, has been at me for

some time past to procure a remission of sentence for one of her

relations who has been in gaol since 2d October. “The Manousch”

[Gypsies], she urges, “are not bad; they do not murder.” And on my

answering with a smile that unluckily they are only too prone to take

what doesn’t belong to them, and that the judges, knowing this, are

extra severe towards them, her answer is, “It is true, it’s in the

blood. Besides, you surely know, you who know all about the Manousch,

they have leave to steal once in seven years.” “How so?” “It’s a story

you surely must know. They were just going to crucify Jesus. One of our

women passed by, and she whipped up one of the nails they were going to

use. She would have liked to steal all four nails, but couldn’t.

Anyhow, it was always one, and that’s why Jesus was crucified with only

three nails, a single one for the two feet. And that’s why Jesus gave

the Manousch leave to steal once every seven years.”’ [9] The

Lithuanian Gypsies say, likewise, that ‘stealing has been permitted in

their favour by the crucified Jesus, because the Gypsies, being present

at the Crucifixion, stole one of the four nails. Hence when the hands

had been nailed, there was but one nail left for the feet; and

therefore God allowed them to steal, and it is not accounted a sin to

them.’ (‘The Lithuanian Gypsies and their Language,’ by Mieczyslaw

Dowojno-Sylwestrowicz, in Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 1889, p. 253.)

This Gypsy counter-legend offers a possible explanation of the

hitherto-unexplained transition from four nails to three in crucifixes

during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The change must at first

have been hardly less startling than a crucifix now would be in which

both hands should be pierced with one nail. Dr. R. Morris discusses it

in his Introduction to Legends of the Holy Rood (Early Eng. Text Soc.,

1871). There it appears that while St. Gregory Nazianzen, Nonnus, and

the author of the Ancren Riwle speak of three nails only, SS. Cyprian,

Augustine, and Gregory of Tours, Pope Innocent III., Rufinus,

Theodoret, and Ælfric speak of four; and that the earliest known

crucifix with three nails only is a copper one, of probably Byzantine

workmanship, dating from the end of the twelfth century. Now, if the

Byzantine Gypsies possessed at that date a metallurgical monopoly, this

crucifix must of course have been fashioned by Gypsy hands, when the

three nails would be an easily intelligible protest against the calumny

that those nails were forged by the founder of the Gypsy race.

I give the suggestion just for what it is worth; but the occurrence of

the legend and the counter-legend in regions so far apart as Lesbos and

Scotland, Alsace and Lithuania, strongly argues their antiquity, and

corroborates the idea that the komodromos was a Gypsy who figures in

‘Anonymus de Passione Domini.’ One would like to know the date of that

Greek manuscript; but Professor R. Bensly, in a long letter of 28th May

1879, could only conjecturally identify it with ‘S. Joannis Theologi

Commentarius Apocryphus MS. de J. C.’ (? No. 929 or 1001, Colbert Coll.

Paris Cat. MSS. [10]). Probably there are many allusions to komodromoi

in Byzantine writers, if one had leisure and scholarship to hunt them

up; certainly it is strange that of Du Cange’s six quotations for

komodromoi four should seem unmistakably to point to Gypsies. I myself

have little doubt of their identity. From which it would follow that

more than a thousand years ago south-eastern Europe had its Gypsies,

and that not as new-comers, but as recognised strollers, like the

Boswells and Stanleys of our old grassy lanes. The verb kōmodromein

occurs in Pollux Archæologus (flo. 183 A.D.); and the classic authors

present many hints of the possible presence of Gypsies in their midst.

Rómani Chals, or Gypsies, would often fit admirably for Chaldæi; and

the fact that the water-wagtail is the ‘Gypsy bird’ of both German and

English Gypsies reminds one that the Greeks had a saying, as old at

least as the fifth century B.C., ‘Poorer than a kinklos’ (κίγκλος =

water-wagtail), and that peasants in the third century A.D. called

homeless wanderers kinkloi. One need not, with Erasmus and Pierius,

derive Cingarus (Zingaro, Tchinghiané, Zigeuner, etc.) from kinklos;

the words in all likelihood were as distinct originally as Gypsies

(Egyptians) and vipseys or gipseys (eruptions of water in the East

Riding of Yorkshire; cf. William of Newburgh’s twelfth century

Chronicle). But the Gypsies may have been led, by the resemblance of

its name to theirs, to adopt the water-wagtail as their bird; and

Theognis and Menander may have applied to the water-wagtail the

epithets ‘much-wandering’ and ‘poor,’ because the bird was associated

in their minds with some poor wandering race.

I do not build on this guesswork, as neither even on the ingenious

theories of M. Bataillard, according to which prehistoric Europe gained

from the Gypsies its knowledge of metallurgy, and which may be studied

in his L’Ancienneté des Tsiganes (1877) and other monographs, or in my

summaries of them in the articles ‘Gipsies’ (Encycl. Britannica, vol.

x. 1879, p. 618), and ‘Gypsies’ (Chambers’s Encycl., vol. v. 1890, p.

487). All that I hold for certain is our absolute uncertainty at

present whether Gypsies first set foot in Europe a thousand years after

or a thousand years before the Christian era. We have no certitude even

for western Europe. In 1866 a large band of English ball-giving Gypsies

paid a visit to Edinburgh; Scottish newspapers of that date wrote as

though Gypsies had never till then been seen to the north of the

Border. That was ridiculous: a similar mistake may have been made by

the German, Swiss, Italian, and French chroniclers of 1417–34. As it

is, M. Bataillard has established the presence, before 1400, of

‘foreigners called Bemische’ in the bishopric of Würzburg, who may have

been Gypsies, as almost indubitably were certain Bemische at

Frankfort-on-Main in 1495 (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 207–10). [11] Then ‘A

Charter of Edward III. confirming the Privileges of St. Giles’ Fair,

Winchester, A.D. 1349’ (ed. by Dean Kitchin, 1886), contains this

passage:—‘And the Justiciaries and the Treasurer of the Bishop of

Wolvesey for the time being, and the Clerk of the Pleas, shall yearly

receive four basons and ewers, by way of fee (as they have received

them of old time) from those traders from foreign parts, called

Dynamitters, who sell brazen vessels in the fair.’ On which passage

Dean Kitchin has this note: ‘These foreigners were sellers, we are

told, of brazen vessels of all kinds. The word may be connected with

Dinant near Namur, where there was a great manufacture of Dinanderie,

i.e. metal-work (chiefly in copper). A friend suggests Dinant-batteurs

as the origin. Batteur was the proper title of these workers in metal.

See Commines, II. i., “une marchandise de ces œuvres de cuivre, qu’on

appelle Dinanderie, qui sont en effet pots et pesles.”’

Gypsy Language.

It is a relief to turn from the thousand and one appellations under

which Gypsies have been known at different times and in different

countries, to the sure and unerring light that their language throws on

their history. Though never a chronicler or traveller had written, we

yet could feel confident from Rómani that the forefathers of our

English Gypsies must for a long period have sojourned in a

Greek-speaking country. Among the Greek loan-words in the Anglo-Rómani

dialect are drom, road, (δρόμος), chírus, time (καιρός), éfta, seven

(ἑπτά), énnea, nine (ἐννέα), fóros, market-town (φόρος), fílisin,

mansion (φυλακτήριον), kekávi, kettle (κακκάβη), kókalo, bone

(κόκαλον), kóli, anger (χολή), kúriki, Sunday (κυριακή), misáli, table

(μενσάλι), óchto, eight (ὀκτώ), pápin, goose (πάππια), pápus,

grandfather (πάππος), sápin, soap (σαποῦνι), shámba, frog (ζάμπα),

síma, to pawn (σημάδι), skámin, chair (σκαμνί), soliváris, reins

(σολιβάρι), stádi, hat (σκιάδι), wagóra, fair (ἀγορά), wálin, bottle

(ὑαλί), and zímin, soup (ζουμί). The total number of Greek loan-words

in the different Gypsy dialects may be about one hundred; and the same

loan-words occur in dialects as widely separate as those of Roumania,

Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Scandinavia, Germany,

Italy, the Basque Country, Spain, and Brazil. This is important as

indicating that the modern Gypsies of Europe are descended not from

successive waves of Oriental immigration, but all from the self-same

European-Gypsy stock, whenever that stock may have first been

transplanted to Europe. It conclusively negatives the Kounavine theory

that the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, and French Gypsies

arrived at their present habitats by way of Africa, and the

Scandinavian Gypsies by way of the Ural Mountains. [12]

Slavonic loan-words come next to the Greek: English Rómani has some

thirty of the former, against fifty of the latter. There are also a few

words of Persian, Armenian, Roumanian, Magyar, and German origin; but

the question of the presence or the absence of Arabic words in European

Rómani is hardly yet determined. According to Professor De Goeje (1875;

trans. in MacRitchie’s Gypsies of India, 1886, pp. 54–5), there are at

least ten such words; according to Miklosich (Ueber die Mundarten,

etc., part vi. 1876, pp. 63–64), there are none. Kótor, a piece, for

instance, by De Goeje is derived from the Arabic kot’a, by Miklosich

from the Armenian kotor. Neither, however, of the two scholars seems to

have recognised the possible importance of the presence or the absence

(especially the absence) of Arabic elements. Rómani contains Persian

words, e.g. ambról, a pear; would it not have certainly contained also

Arabic words if the ancestors of our modern European Gypsies had

sojourned in Persia, or even passed through Persia, at a date later

than the Arab conquest of Persia? If Miklosich is right in his

contention that there are no Arabic words in European Rómani, it

follows almost inevitably that the Gypsies must have passed through

Persia on their way to Europe at some date prior to the middle of the

seventh century A.D.

Important as are the borrowings of Rómani for helping us to trace the

Gypsies’ wanderings, they can barely amount to a twentieth of the total

vocabulary (five thousand words rich, perhaps). The words of that

vocabulary for ‘water’ and ‘knife’ are in Persia páni, cheri (1823); in

Siberia, panji, tschuri (1878); in Armenia, pani, churi (1864); in

Egypt, páni, chúri (1856); in Norway, pani, tjuri (1858); in England

pani, churi (1830); in, probably, Belgium, panin, chouri (1597); in

Brazil, panin, churin (1886)—where spelling and dates are those of the

works whence these words have been taken. Over and above the identity

in every Rómani dialect of these two selected words—and there are

hundreds more like them—they are also identical with the Hindustani

pani and churi, familiar to all Anglo-Indians. And to cite but a few

more instances, ‘nose,’ ‘hair,’ ‘eye,’ ‘ear’ are in Turkish Rómani nak,

bal, akh, kann; in Hindustani, nak, bal, akh, kan: whilst ‘Go, see who

knocks at the door’ in the one language is Jâ, dik kon chalavéla o

vudár, and in the other Jâ, dekh kon chaláya dvár ko. This discovery

was not made till long after specimens of Rómani had been published—by

Andrew Boorde (1542), whose twenty-six words, jotted down seemingly in

a Sussex alehouse, were intended to illustrate the ‘speche of Egipt’;

by Bonaventura Vulcanius (1597), whose vocabulary of seventy-one words,

collected apparently in Belgium, fills up some blank pages in a Latin

work on the Goths; and by Ludolphus (1691), whose thirty-eight words

are embedded in his huge Commentarius ad Historiam Æthiopicam. In 1777

Rüdiger first compared with Hindustani some specimens of Rómani got

from a Gypsy woman at Halle, and in 1782 he published the result of the

comparison in his Neuester Zuwachs der Sprachkunde. In 1783 Grellmann’s

Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner reaped all the fruits of

Rüdiger’s research; and William Marsden the same year was independently

led to a like discovery (Archæologia, 1785, pp. 382–6). Grellmann,

whose work has still a high value, leapt naturally enough to the

conclusion that the Gypsies who showed themselves in western Europe in

1417 had newly come also to south-eastern Europe, and were a low-caste

Indian tribe expelled from their native country about 1409 by

Tamerlane. In 1783 the older languages of India were a sealed book to

Europeans; and Grellmann’s opinion found almost universal approval for

upwards of sixty years. Now, however, thanks to the linguistic labours

of Pott, Ascoli, and Miklosich, combined with the historical researches

of Bataillard and Hopf, the question has assumed a new aspect. For

while on the one hand it has been demonstrated that south-east Europe

had its Gypsies long before 1417, so on the other Rómani has been shown

to be a sister, not a daughter—and it may be an elder sister—of the

seven principal New Indian dialects. Not a few of its forms are more

primitive than theirs, or even than those of Pali and the Prakrits—e.g.

the Turkish Rómani vast, hand (Sansk. hasta, Pali hattha), and vusht,

lip (Sansk. ostha, Pali ottha). In his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der

Zigeunermundarten (iv. 1878, pages 45–54) Miklosich collected a number

of such forms; but Miklosich it was who also pointed out there that

many of the seeming archaisms of Rómani may be matched from the

less-known dialects of India, especially north-west India—that we find,

for example, in Dardu both hast and usht. I have not the faintest

notion what was Professor Sayce’s authority for his statement that ‘the

grammar and dictionary of the Romany prove that they started from their

kindred, the Jats, on the north-western coast of India, near the mouth

of the Indus, not earlier than the tenth century of the Christian era’

(The Science of Language, ii. 325). So far as I know, the only

attempted comparison between Rómani and Játáki was made by myself

(‘Gipsies,’ Enc. Brit., x. 618); and its results seemed wholly

unfavourable to the Jat theory of the Gypsies’ origin.

Gypsies as Nomads.

No; language, like history, has yielded important results, but on many

points we still have almost everything to learn. We do not know within

a thousand years when the Gypsies left India, or when they arrived in

Persia, Armenia, Africa, Asia Minor, and South-eastern Europe. But we

do know that India was their original home, that they must have

sojourned long in a Greek-speaking region, and that in western and

northern Europe their present dispersion dates mainly if not entirely

from after the year 1417. These three facts will have to be borne in

mind for understanding what follows; a fourth fact is that a portion,

if a small portion, of the Gypsy race is still intensely nomadic.

Nothing is commoner than for the English Gypsies of our novels and

plays to speak familiarly of ‘sunny Spain’; those of a little anonymous

story, The Gipsies (1842), go backwards and forwards to Norway. But as

a rule English Gypsies never stir out of Great Britain, or, if they do

leave it, leave it only for another English-speaking country—Canada,

the United States, or New Zealand. [13] So far, too, as we know, our

present Gypsies are all descendants of early Gypsy immigrants; their

surnames—Lee, Faa, Baillie, Stanley, Gray, Smith, Heron, Boswell,

etc.—date back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And our sole

hint, until a quite recent date, as to visits to England by Continental

Gypsies is a Bartholomew Fair handbill of 1689 about some German

Gypsies, rope-dancers.

Caldarari.

Mutatis mutandis, the same seems to hold good of the Gypsies of

Germany, Poland, Norway, etc.; they are apparently the descendants of

early immigrants into those different countries. But the case is quite

otherwise with the Caldarari, or coppersmiths, of Hungary, for they

will wander forth north, south, east, west, and sometimes stay away a

whole seven years. Myself I have met with Caldarari but once, at Halle,

in 1875; I described that brief meeting thus in my Gypsy Tents (1880,

pp. 43–44):—

‘I had been paying my first call to Professor Pott, who had told me

that only once had he spoken with living Gypsies, somewhere near

London. So I asked him did they never come to Halle, and he answered,

No; and presently I came away. I was not two hundred yards from his

doorstep, when I saw a curious sort of skeleton waggon, drawn by two

little horses, with their forelegs shackled together. On the top of

this waggon sat a woman smoking a big black pipe; and round it three or

four children were playing, stark-naked. The waggon was standing

outside an inn; and entering the inn, I found two Gypsy men seated at

the table, eating soup and drinking beer. I greeted them with “Látcho

dívvus” (Good-day), and they seemed not the least bit surprised, for

these were travelled gentlemen. Three years they had been away from

Hungary, in France and Germany; and they could both speak French and

German fluently. We talked of many things, and compared, I remember,

passports: mine they pronounced an exceeding shúkar lil (fine

document), the lion and unicorn seeming to take their fancy. Every

place they came to, they had to go first thing to the head policeman

and show their passes, and then he told them where they were to stop.

They were allowed three days in every place, and no one could meddle

with them all that time.... The women came in, two of them, and some of

the children. There was one, a little fellow of nine or ten, as brown

and pretty a thing as ever I saw, but wild as a fox-cub. His father

gave him a plate of soup to finish, and he lapped it up just as a

fox-cub would, looking out at me now and again from behind his mother.

Then they paid their reckoning, the women climbed up on the waggon, the

children shouted, and the men cracked their whips. “God go with thee,

brother”; and so we parted.’

There is not much in that, but one cannot learn much in half an hour’s

chance interview. Nor, indeed, is there very much in all the scattered

notes that I have been able thus far to collect respecting the

Caldarari; some of those notes relate to them only conjecturally. Du

Cange’s definition of komodromoi proves that coppersmiths roamed

through France in 1688; and it is at least highly probable that to this

caste belonged the band of forty Gypsies with whom, in the spring of

1604, Jacques Callot, a boy of twelve, wandered from Nancy to Florence.

Of the journey itself we know nothing, but he has left an imperishable

record of it in his three matchless engravings of the ‘Bohémiens,’

which show them on the march, in their bivouac, and spoiling the

Gentiles. Charles Reade worked a clever description of Callot’s

engravings into his Cloister and the Hearth, and they were admirably

reproduced in the Gypsy Lore Journal for January 1890, with a long

article on them by Mr. David MacRitchie.

In his Travels (1763, ii. 157–8), under the date 1721, John Bell of

Antermony has the following passage:—‘During our stay at Tobolsky, I

was informed, that a large troop of gipsies had been lately at that

place, to the number of sixty and upwards, consisting of men, women,

and children. The Russians call these vagabonds tziggany. Their sorry

baggage was carried on horses and asses. The arrival of so many

strangers being reported to Mr. Petroff Solovoy, the vice-governor, he

sent for some of the chief of the gang, and demanded whither they were

going? they answered him, to China; upon which he told them he could

not permit them to proceed any farther eastward, as they had no

passport; and ordered them to return to the place whence they came. It

seems these people had roamed, in small parties, during the summer

season, cross the vast countries between Poland and this place;

subsisting themselves on what they could find, and on selling trinkets,

and telling fortunes to the country people. But Tobolsky, being the

place of rendezvous, was the end of their long journey eastwards; and

they, with no small regret, were obliged to turn their faces to the

west again.’ I fancy these Gypsies also must have been Caldarari. But

whether they were or no, the passage remains one of the most curious

that we have relating to Gypsy migrations. Taken in its most limited

sense, it shows that the band had wandered in small detachments from

Poland to Tobolsk, a distance of two thousand miles or upwards. But it

suggests a great deal more than this. There seems no reason to question

the statement that China was really the ultimate goal of their

wanderings. If so, it is probable that they were following in the track

of former migrations, that Gypsies had been in the habit of passing

backwards and forwards between Europe and China, which opens up a vista

of a possible connection between the West and the farthest East

undreamed of by all our geographers. But without further evidence this

must be mere conjecture. Of Gypsies in China I know nothing whatever,

except that a Russian noble, Prince Galitzin, whom I met three years

since in Edinburgh, assured me he had seen a number of them there.

Physique, outward appearance, seemed his only test; and his statement,

though interesting, needs corroboration.

The Weserzeitung of 25th April 1851 announced that one hundred Gypsies

had passed through Frankfort, on their way from Hungary to Algeria; and

in the Revue de l’Orient for 20th January 1889 Madame Marlet thus

described her meeting with a Hungarian Gypsy in North Africa:—‘I shall

ever remember a scene which I witnessed in Africa. It was one evening

at the base of the superb mountains of Mustapha Supérieur, just as the

setting sun flooded the plain with his last rays of golden and crimson

light—the gold and purple of the incomparable majesty of the Eastern

sky. I observed a caravan of nomads encamped in the plain beneath their

tents. I drew near, and saw that they were Gypsies, but Gypsies who had

dwelt under other skies. Some were Spanish Gitanos, with garments of

many hues, their shears hanging by their sides, at the end of a

silvered chain wound around their blades; the others came from Morocco,

and wore the simple white attire of the Children of the Desert. They

received me with indifference. By means of my knowledge of Italian I

managed at length to make the Gitanos understand that I came from

Hungary. They were at once alive with interest. “Hungaria!” I heard

them whisper into one another’s ears; and finally an old Gypsy man

informed me, “There is one of us who comes straight from that very

country.” They ran all at once to seek him out. But the young Gypsy—a

superb, swarthy figure—quite unmoved, maintained a proud and gloomy

silence. Did he suspect me of untruth in telling him that I knew that

Hungary, so far away beyond the wide stretch of sea? He may have

thought so. However, I saw that the old Gitano had told the truth. The

dress of the young nomad was entirely Hungarian, from his shining boots

up to his little Magyar calpate. His attire generally was rather rich

than poor. Had I conversed with him in Hungarian, perhaps his heart

would have softened. But he remained thus, sombre and mistrustful, and

only the Gitanos, who, in their fantastic rags, stood around us,

repeated vivaciously in Spanish, as they pointed towards him, “Patria

Hungaria!”’

Ciboure.

Ciboure, a suburb of St. Jean de Luz, is a sort of Basque Yetholm. Like

Yetholm it has largely lost its Gypsy character. Its ‘Cascarrotac’ are

supposed to be the descendants of Gypsies who came from Spain two

centuries ago, but they are now quite mixed up with the Basques of the

neighbourhood, and have lost the last remnants of Rómani, though at the

beginning of the century they retained a few words, as debla, the sun,

mambrun, bread, and puro, old man. But Ciboure is still a regular

halting-place of Hungarian Gypsies, as appears from this passage in a

very valuable article on ‘The Cascarrots of Ciboure,’ by the Rev.

Wentworth Webster (Gypsy Lore Journal, October 1888, pp. 76–84):—‘My

own observations are that the passage of the Hungarian Gypsies, or

Gypsies from Eastern Europe, alluded to in 1868 and 1874 by the former

mayor of Ciboure, M. Darramboure, is a recurring fact every two or

three years. I left St. Jean de Luz in 1881, but for some time before

that I had been ill, and a band may easily have passed without my being

aware of it; but there were at least two other bands between 1870 and

1880—one, I believe, in 1872. [14] Their route seems to be, as far as I

have been able to trace it, viâ Paris, Bordeaux, Bayonne, St. Jean de

Luz, Hendaye, through Spain quite to the south, and returning by the

eastern extremity of the Pyrenees, by Barcelona and Perpignan. M. de

Rochas appears to have met one of these bands at Perpignan in July 1875

(Les Parias de France et d’Espagne, by V. de Rochas; Hachette, Paris,

1876, p. 259). These bands follow always the same route, and encamp on

the same spots. When at St. Jean de Luz they make an apparently useless

visit to Ascain, a village about five miles off their road, returning

to St. Jean de Luz. They are evidently well-off, with good carts,

wagons, horses, and utensils; many of them wear silver ear-rings and

ornaments. Their trade, mending the copper vessels in the

neighbourhood, seems to me to be a mere pretence; it cannot pay the

expenses of the journey. What is the reason of this migration? Once I

was standing with a Basque fisherman, watching their arrival, when the

chief of the band addressed him in Basque, and the conversation went on

between them in that language. When it had ceased, I asked the

fisherman, whom I knew well, how the man spoke Basque. The reply was

curt:—“He speaks it as well as I do.” Afterwards I tried to draw out

the Gypsy, but he evaded my questions. “We pick up languages along the

road. I was never in the neighbourhood before,” etc. These I believe to

have been falsehoods. I must, however, add, that I have known Basque

scholars learn Magyar, and Hungarians Basque, with unusual facility.

Still the question remains: What is the object of these journeys?—a

question for your Society to answer.’

Alas! the Gypsy Lore Society is dead; after four years’ most excellent

work it died of want of support in 1892. And that question remains

still unanswered. In the passage itself, however, there is a good deal

to be noticed. Ciboure at present has little or nothing to draw foreign

Gypsies to it; but a hundred, two hundred years ago, it was probably a

genuine Gypsy quarter: then there would be every reason why Caldarari

should make it a regular halting-place. This conjecture, if valid,

suggests the antiquity of these strange peregrinations; and Gypsies

assuredly are the very staunchest conservatives. Another guess is that

at Ascain Gypsies very likely are buried; that would fully account for

their descendants turning aside thus. Mr. Webster’s remark as to the

ease with which Basque scholars acquire Magyar, and Hungarians Basque,

was well worth making; still the fact remains—and it is an important

one for our theory—that the unlettered Gypsies as a race are marvellous

linguists. The immigrants of 1417–34 must, to tell fortunes as they

did, have been able to speak German, French, and Italian; and I could,

if necessary, adduce many testimonies as to the Gypsies’ faculty for

picking up foreign languages. I have myself known an English Gypsy

family remove (for family reasons) into Wales, and in three years’ time

become thoroughly Cymricised.

M. Paul Bataillard was for years collecting materials about the

Caldarari, but he died without publishing his promised monograph on the

subject, so we must content ourselves with these stray notes from his

writings:—‘The Gypsy Caldarari (as they are called in the districts of

Roumania where they are accustomed to journey), have recommenced in our

own days, throughout the whole of the west, circuits which have led

them sometimes as far as England, as far as Norway, and sometimes, by

way of France and Spain, as far as Corsica and Algeria. France was

during a certain time “infested” by them, to quote the newspapers of

the day, whilst I was rejoicing in the good luck which had thrown them

in my way.... These exotic Gypsy blacksmiths generally return to the

country whence they came.... They travel sometimes in rather large

numbers in waggons which have no resemblance to the houses upon wheels

of our Gypsies; and wherever they stop they set up large tents, where

each waggon finds its place. The men have generally long hair, and

clothes more or less foreign, often ornamented with very large silver

buttons; and the chiefs carry a large stick with a silver head. It is

easy to recognise them at a glance by these signs, and by their

trade.... The journeys of these Gypsy blacksmiths had already been

noticed in Germany and Italy [15] long before 1866. On the other hand,

the edict of Ferdinand and Isabella, published at Medina del Campo in

1499, mentions the “Calderos estrangeros,” who might well be Gypsies

(“Immigration of the Gypsies into Western Europe,” Gypsy Lore Journal,

i. 202–3).... The Caldarari, if I am rightly informed, form a

corporation, strictly organised, and having its hierarchical chiefs.

They always travel in groups, commanded by chiefs of different degrees;

and the work is done always in common. They even say it is the head

chief who procures at Temesvar all the copper used by the corporation,

and supplies the wandering bands with it.... There was certainly an

intermission in the circular journeys pushed as far as France and

farther, since I know of none that date from earlier than 1866; but

they may have gone back to a long way beyond that date; and, as a

matter of fact, before 1866 the Caldarari made excursions in Germany

and Italy’ (Les Zlotars, p. 549).... ‘A fact still stranger is that

Algeria has recently received a visit from Hungarian Gypsies, forming

part of the numerous bands of Danubian Tsigans (for the most part

chaudronniers), who, for some years (especially since 1866) have been

traversing the West. I know for a fact that at Algiers a band of twenty

to twenty-five persons was seen towards the middle of 1871, and that

the same persons, or others like them, reappeared six months later. I

have myself seen at Paris Hungarian Gypsies who had a vague idea of

visiting Algeria’ (Les Bohémiens en Algérie, 1874, p. 3, note). Cf.

also his L’origine des Tsiganes, pp. 54–58.

In an article on the Lithuanian Gypsies (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 252) M.

Mieczyslaw Dowojno-Sylwestrowicz says: ‘Sometimes we are visited also

by Hungarian, Servian, and Roumanian Gypsies. These last consider

themselves to belong to the Orthodox (i.e. the Russian) Church. They

are mostly tinkers, repairing copper cooking utensils; but of these

they are very apt to steal the copper bottoms, substituting an

imitation of papier-mâché. They differ greatly from our own Gypsies,

whom they excel in an incredible amount of obtrusiveness; moreover,

they attack and rob wayfarers, and when asked what they are, they say,

“We are not Gypsies, sir, we are Magyars.”’

In an article, already quoted, on the Gypsies of Belgium (ib. iii. 138)

Professor Henri van Elven writes of the Caldarari:—‘They usually

travelled in little two-wheeled carts covered over with tilts of grey

cloth, and containing straw, baggage, and tinworkers’ tools. They have

a great love for their horses, who are far from being in the miserable

condition of horses of wandering mountebanks. I have seen the children

share their bread with the horses. They buy and sell—sometimes

steal—their horses. They have also dogs, large and well set-up. Their

clothes are for the most part of Hungarian style, but also often like

ours; notably, of gaudy colours, red and blue. All have long, black,

curly hair, well furnished with inhabitants, which renders scratching a

habit. [16] The complexion is swarthy; the features are fine and

strongly accentuated, both among the men and the women. The nose is

fairly long, and aquiline; the teeth are yellow, through the use of

tobacco in all forms among women as well as men, unless in the case of

some young girls.... These Gypsies were tin-workers, repairing metal

utensils, and also basket-makers. The women went from door to door,

asking work and begging. The women and children usually go barefoot and

bare-headed, even in bad weather, displaying an astonishing endurance.

We have not observed any smelters among the Gypsies, but many

exhibitors of animals, jugglers, and female fortune-tellers. With

regard to the young girls given over to vice, they are better attired,

wearing clothes of the Italian and Hungarian modes of bright colours.

They go about in the evening especially, looking about them, or

carrying playing-cards, or again with small articles of basket-work for

sale.’

In 1879 Sir Henry Howorth encountered in Sweden fez-wearing Gypsies,

natives presumably of the Balkan peninsula; and in July 1881 a band of

Gypsy blacksmiths from Corfu landed in Corsica, after having travelled

over Italy (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 204, note). Late in the sixties a

company of Caldarari visited England, and encamped at several points

round London. I know no mention of this visit in print, and I never met

them myself, but I have talked with English Gypsies who did, and who

were full of their little horses, their big copper vessels, and curious

Rómani. Some of the Taylors on Rushmere Heath in 1873 told me these

foreign Gypsies ‘came from the Langári country, and were called

Langarians.’

‘Greek Gypsies.’

In July 1886 ninety-nine Gypsies arrived by train at Liverpool. They

were called the ‘Greek Gypsies,’ and had started from Corfu, but

according to their passports came from all parts of Greece and European

Turkey, as also from Servia, Bulgaria, Roumania, even Smyrna. Three

hundred napoleons their journey had cost them thus far, and they meant

to take shipping to New York. But America being closed to ‘pauper’

immigrants, no steamboat company would accept them, and they had

perforce to encamp at Liverpool. Their encampment was visited by Mr.

David MacRitchie and Mr. H. T. Crofton, the joint author with Dr. Bath

Smart of the admirable Dialect of the English Gipsies (1875); the

former wrote an excellent article about them in Chambers’s Journal for

September 1886. These Gypsies were not Caldarari, though some of them

were coppersmiths (designated as ‘chaudronniers’); others were

builders, bricklayers, and agriculturists. They were typical Gypsies in

physique, but not in apparel, ‘absolutely free from the vice of

drunkenness,’ but most inveterate beggars. Their chief spokesman ‘was

quite an accomplished linguist, and could speak Greek, Russian,

Roumanian, and two or three other dialects of south-eastern Europe. The

curious thing was, that he never once included in his list his own

mother tongue, the speech of the Gypsy race. Neither would he admit

that he was a Ziganka, not for a long time, at anyrate; but

subsequently both he and his comrades answered to the name of Roum, and

the cigar was no longer bōn’ but lásho.’ After stopping some time at

Liverpool, these Gypsies crossed over to Hull, but neither there could

they get passage to America; about a year later, so an English Gypsy

informed me, a showman was exhibiting them, or some of them, through

Yorkshire. Their subsequent fate is unknown to me; perhaps they are in

process of absorption into English Gypsydom.

Eastern Gypsies in Galloway.

I thought at first it must have been some of this band whom my friend

Mr. Robert Burns, the Edinburgh artist, met in Galloway in 1895; but

his account of that meeting, written at my request, dispels that

notion:—‘Two years ago, while walking with my wife near Kirkcudbright,

I met a large troop of Gypsies, of a type quite different from any I

had formerly seen. The first to appear round a corner was a tall,

swarthy man leading a brown bear. My dog, a big powerful beast,

immediately made a rush for the bear, but I managed to catch him in

time. On seeing me holding the dog, the man came up, and, in very

broken English, said that the bear would not hurt the dog. I explained

that my fears were not for the dog but for the bear, an undersized,

emaciated beast, and strongly muzzled. By this time we were surrounded

by the whole troop, numbering, I should think, sixteen or seventeen,

all begging from the “pretty lady” and “kind gentleman,” which seemed

to be about all the English they knew. A good-looking young woman, with

a baby on her back, asked me in French if I understood that language. I

said I did, and asked her where they came from. “From Spain.” Then she

spoke Spanish also? “Oh! yes, and German, and other languages as well.”

I tried her with a few sentences in German and Spanish, and found that

she spoke both languages fluently, although with an accent which made

it difficult to understand her. While we were talking, the men, not

having stopped, were a considerable distance off. So I gave the woman

some silver, while my wife distributed pennies among the children, and

with many smiles and thanks they started off to join the others. They

were very dark in colour, like Hindoos; the men and the older women

very aquiline in feature, some of the younger girls really beautiful,

with lithe graceful figures; and all without exception had splendid

teeth. Their dress, though ragged and dirty, suggested Eastern Europe

rather than Spain; some cheap brass and silver ornaments seemed to

point in the same direction. They had two ponies with panniers, full of

babies, cabbages, empty strawberry baskets, and other odds and ends;

one of the ponies had a headstall of plaited cord similar to those used

in Hungary. I saw them several times about Kirkcudbright and

Gatehouse-on-Fleet; and from mental studies painted the head exhibited

in the R.S.A. Exhibition of 1896.’

These must have been Ursári, or bear-wards, and recent arrivals in

Britain; but what were they doing in that remote corner of Galloway, in

Billy Marshall’s old kingdom? Frampton Boswell, an English Gypsy of my

acquaintance, met the very same band, I fancy, near Glasgow in 1896;

and they were perhaps the foreign Gypsies encamped at Dunfermline in

the autumn of 1897—I was lying ill at the time in Edinburgh. Almost

certainly they were identical with ‘a little band of Roumanian Ursári’

whom Mr. Sampson met in Lancashire in the latter half of 1897, and who

were ‘travelling in English-Gypsy vans which they had bought in this

country. They stopped for a month or more at Wavertree, quite close to

us, and I saw a good deal of them. The first time, crossing a field by

night and expecting to meet with some of the English breed, I stumbled

among the six unmuzzled bears, chained to the wheels of the vans, and

took them for large dogs till their grunts undeceived me; fortunately I

got off with whole legs. They spoke a jumble of tongues—some Slavonic

dialect (brat = brother), bad French, Italian, no German, and little

English; but with the help of Rómani and scraps of other tongues we

held some instructive conversations. Their young girls were beautiful,

half-clad, savage, but the older women ugly as sin. When I first spoke

to them, they replied to a question in Rómani with an Italian

denial:—‘We are not Gypsies, we are (✠) Christianos.’

Oh for three years of health, a thousand pounds sterling, say, and a

good capacity for wine and languages! I would pass those three years at

Temesvar and Ciboure, and also perhaps in Morocco; at their close I

should hold the key to Mr. Wentworth Webster’s problem. Fifty years

hence, very likely, there will no longer be any problem left to solve;

the ancient corporation of the Caldarari will have undergone

dissolution.

Gypsy Folk-tales.

Given then this wandering race, from time immemorial established in

Europe, but emigrants originally from India: the interest of their

folk-tales, if folk-tales indeed they have, will surely at once be

apparent to every student of Indo-European folklore. Yet folklorists as

a body seem strangely ignorant of the existence of Rómani folk-tales,

of the fact that not a few Gypsies are even professional story-tellers.

Campbell of Islay.

In the Saturday Review for 22nd August 1856 was an article by, I fancy,

Grenville Murray, the ‘Roving Englishman,’ on Alexandri’s Ballades et

Chants Populaires de la Roumanie, where allusion is made to ‘the

long-haired Gypsies who wander about in their snowy tunics and bright

sashes, the ῥαψῷδοι of Moldo-Wallachia, as in Russia their brethren are

the popular musicians.’ But our earliest account of actual Gypsy

folk-tales occurs in vol. iv. p. 431 of Popular Tales of the West

Highlands, by J. F. Campbell of Islay (4 vols. Edinburgh, 1860–62).

That eminent collector ‘picked up two gipsy tinkers in London—William

and Soloman Johns. [17] They came to the office after hours, and were

treated to beer and tobacco. Present, the author of Norse Tales [Sir

George Dasent]. They were rather hard to start, but, when once set

agoing, they were fluent. One brother was very proud of the other, who

plays the fiddle by ear, and is commonly sent for to wakes, where he

entertains the company with stories. He gave us: (1) A ghost, which

appeared to himself. Finding that he was on the wrong track, told him a

popular tale which I had got from another tinker in London, “The Cutler

and Tinker.” Got (2) “The Lad and the Dancing Pigs.” This is the same

as the “Mouse and Bee,” and has something of “Hacon Grizzlebeard.” A

version of it was told to me by Donald MacPhie in South Uist. It is one

of the few indecent stories which I have heard in the Highlands. There

are adventures with a horse, a lion, and a fox, which the London tinker

had not got. It savours of the wit which is to be found in Straparola.

(No. 3) A sailor and others by the help of a magic blackthorn stick, go

to three underground castles of copper, silver, and gold, and win three

princesses. Same as “The King of Lochlin’s Daughters” [i. 236] and “The

Knight of Grianaig” [iii. 1], and several stories in Norse Tales and

Grimm. (No. 4) “The Five Hunchbacks.” This story was quite new to both

of us, but a version of it was subsequently found in a book of

Cruikshank’s. The tinker’s version was much better. (No. 5) A long and

very well told story of a Jew, in which there figured a magic strap,

hat, etc. Same as “Big and Little Peter,” “Eoghan Tuarach” [ii. 235], a

story in Straparola, etc. [cf. my No. 68]. (No. 6) “The Art of

Doctoring”—dirty wit. (No. 7) Poor student and black man travel, dig up

dead woman, make fire in church, steal sheep, clerk and parson take

black man for fiend and bolt. Very well told. See “Goosey Grizzle” and

several Gaelic versions. (No. 8) Poor student, parson, and man with

cat, which was the fiend in disguise. Well told; new to both of us. The

men said that they knew a great many more; that they could neither read

nor write; that they picked these up at wakes and other meetings, where

such tales are commonly told in England now.’

I hoped that the Campbell MSS. in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh,

might yield some further notes on these eight folk-tales; but a search,

instituted in 1888 through the kindness of Mr. Clark, the librarian,

proved ineffectual. Of all unlikely places in the world for a

professional story-teller, London seems the unlikeliest; the heroine,

it may be remembered, of Mr. Hardy’s Hand of Ethelberta prides herself

on the absolute novelty of the notion. What is almost more surprising

is that two folklorists like Campbell and Dasent should have struck so

precious a vein, and not followed it up. Whatever the source of these

stories, Gypsy, Irish, or English, they were distinctly valuable, and

their value was enhanced by the meagreness forty years ago of the

folk-tales collected in England. [18] But it is quite possible that one

or other of the two brothers may still be living (he need not be

seventy). At least any folklorist could probably find this out at the

Potteries, Notting Hill, on Mitcham Common, or in some other of the

Gypsyries in or round London.

Again in vol. i. p. xlvii., Campbell tells how in February 1860 he ‘met

two tinkers in St James’s Street, with black faces and a pan of burning

coals each. They were followed by a wife, and preceded by a mangy

terrier with a stiff tail. I joined the party, and one told me a

version of “The Man who travelled to learn what Shivering meant,” while

we walked together through the park to Westminster. It was clearly the

popular tale which exists in Norse, and German, and Gaelic, and it bore

the stamp of the class, and of the man, who told it in his own peculiar

dialect, and who dressed the actors in his own ideas. A cutler and a

tinker travel together, and sleep in an empty house for a reward. They

are beset by ghosts and spirits of murdered ladies and gentlemen; and

the inferior, the tinker, shows most courage, and is the hero. “He went

into the cellar to draw beer, and there he found a little chap

a-sittin’ on a barrel with a red cap on ’is ’ed; and sez he, sez he,

‘Buzz.’ ‘Wot’s buzz?’ sez the tinker. ‘Never you mind wot’s buzz,’ sez

he. ‘That’s mine; don’t you go for to touch it,’” etc. etc. etc.’ [Cf.

my No. 57, ‘Ashypelt,’ and No. 74, ‘The Tale of the Soldier.’ [19]] In

vol. ii. p. 285, Campbell adds that he was never able again to find

this London tinker, who ‘could not read the card which I gave him, with

a promise of payment if he would come and repeat his stock of stories.

His female companion, indeed, could both read the card and speak

French. The whole lot seemed to suspect some evil design on my part;

and I have never seen the one who told the story or the woman since,

though I met their comrade afterwards.’

In enumerating the sources of his Gaelic stories (i. p. xxiv.),

Campbell gives (a) a West Country fisherman; (b) an old dame of

seventy; (c) a pretty lass; or (d) ‘it is an old wandering vagabond of

a tinker who has no roof but the tattered covering of his tent....

There he lies, an old man past eighty, who has been a soldier, and “has

never seen a school”; too proud to beg, too old to work; surrounded by

boxes and horn spoons; with shaggy hair and naked feet, as perfect a

nomad as the wildest Lapp or Arab in the whole world.’ etc. Campbell

gives four stories of tinker origin, our Nos. 73–76. To them and to

their tellers I shall revert in my Introduction.

Dr. F. Müller.

In Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Rom-Sprache (Vienna, 1869), Dr. Friedrich

Müller, the ‘leading representative of linguistic ethnology,’ published

five Hungarian-Gypsy stories in the original Rómani, with an

interlinear German translation. Taken down by Herr Fialowski from the

recitation of a Hungarian-Gypsy soldier, Šipoš Janoš, quartered at

Vienna, these stories are wholly void of literary merit. They are

rambling and disconnected, sometimes all but unintelligible, and often

excessively gross. At the same time they are genuine folk-tales; the

soldier was trying to remember stories he had heard, not weaving them

out of his own imagination. Four of them offer variants of Gypsy

stories in other collections; and of these four I give summaries on pp.

19, 34, 48, 174, and 208. The fifth, ‘The Wallachian Gypsy,’ after six

most Rabelaisian pages, passes on to a Tannhäuser episode. For the

Gypsy, having murdered his father, plants on his grave the stick he

killed him with. ‘And that stick began to blossom. That son went about

on his knees for four-and-twenty years, and carried water in his mouth.

And every evening the tree blossomed, and every evening grew a red

apple.... And once the king came that way,... and as he went to pluck

an apple, “Stay,” said the Gypsy, “don’t seize it so, but shake the

tree, and then they will all turn into doves.” The king shook the tree,

and all the apples then turned into doves. Up they flew, and the poor

son’s father arose.’ The Gypsy then goes in quest of the Otter King

(Vídrisko Kírāli). A king gives him a filly that can speak. On the way

he is fed by a swineherd (one pail of wine and a whole swine) and a

neatherd (an ox and two pails); he then meets a shepherd, overcomes a

wether, and stabs the shepherd at his own request. Come to the Otter

King, he eats his grapes, empties the biggest barrel of wine, wrestles

with the Otter King on the Golden Bridge, and turns him into stone. He

inquires of the king’s daughter, ‘Where is thy father’s strength?’ ‘My

father’s strength is underneath the bridge. There is a besom; draw out

a twig; and if thou with this, if thou with this wilt strike all the

stones, then they will all turn into men.’ After trying once vainly to

destroy him, the maiden pushes him into a fountain. But he ups with the

fountain, and puts it and a tree under the window of a king, to whom he

becomes turkey-keeper. A lady falls with child by him. He is caught,

and there is a trial. She has had other lovers, and she is adjudged to

him to whom she shall throw a red apple. She throws it to the Gypsy. So

they marry and have children.—A nightmare kind of story this, which I

can match from no other collection; still it offers numerous analogies,

e.g. for the apple-tree, to Hahn, i. 70 and my No. 17; for turning men

into stone, to Hahn, i. 172 and ii. 47; for the besom, to Hahn, ii.

294; and for throwing the apple, to Hahn, i. 94, 104, and ii. 56; also

Bernhard Schmidt’s Griechische Märchen, pp. 85, 228, and Reinhold

Köhler in Orient und Occident, ii. 304–6.

Dr. Paspati.

Alexander G. Paspati, M.D., who died at Athens in the Christmas week of

1891, practised long as a doctor at Constantinople, and was an eminent

Byzantine antiquary. His Études sur les Tchinghianés ou Bohémiens de

l’Empire Ottoman (Cont. 1870, 652 pp.), is one of the very best works

that we have on the Rómani language. It is largely based on

Turkish-Gypsy folk-tales, of which Dr. Paspati seems to have made a

huge collection, but six only of which are published by him as an

appendix (pp. 594–629), in the original Rómani with a French

translation. Two of these six stories—‘Baldpate,’ No. 2, and ‘The

Riddle,’ No. 3—he got from a sedentary Gypsy, ‘Léon Zafiri,

middle-aged, by profession mower, musician, and story-teller. Gifted

with a prodigious memory, this man has repeated to me a great number of

folk-tales (contes fabuleux), portions of which I have inserted in the

text of my vocabulary. To test his memory I have made him repeat some

of these stories, and he has retold them word for word, making only

very slight changes. During the long nights of winter his brother

Gypsies invite him to tell his tales, which he also translates into

Turkish with extreme facility. I have one whose recital would occupy

two hours. These stories are very old. He has heard them from various

members of his race, and has been able to retain them in his marvellous

memory. I have written these stories at his dictation. I have several

volumes of them among my papers. Several were told by his grandfather,

long since dead, who was also a story-teller. In these stories, with

their mixture of truth and fable, I have not hitherto met any token

either of their Indian origin or of an ancient faith. I say that these

stories are old, for one finds in them words such as manghín, shéhi,

etc., which to-day are quite forgotten by the Tchinghianés. This

illiterate man is not only familiar with the dialect of the Sedentary

Gypsies, but he knows also that of the Nomads, in whose midst he sings

his songs and tells his stories. One is sorry to see a man of such

intelligence, so superior to the mass of his race, dragging out a

pitiful existence and clad in rags’ (pp. 34–35).

Paspati was, obviously, no folklorist; the folk-tales to him were

valuable solely as so much linguistic material. But every word almost

of the above deserves the closest consideration. I have tried, but in

vain hitherto, to recover some trace of those ‘several volumes’; their

destruction would be a grievous loss to the science of folklore. [20]

Still, from passages cited in the vocabulary, one can guess at in some

cases, and in others actually identify, a portion of their contents.

Thus, when one finds, ‘The Sun said to her, “Thou art pretty, and thou

art good; thou art not as pretty as Maklítcha”’ (p. 580), one may feel

sure that the Tchinghianés must possess some such version of Grimm’s

‘Little Snow-white’ (No. 53) as ‘Marietta et la Sorcière, sa Marâtre,’

in Carnoy and Nicolaides’ Traditions Populaires de l’Asie Mineure (p.

91), where the stepmother asks, not a mirror, but the Sun, ‘Hast thou

seen any woman fairer than I?’ and the Sun answers, ‘I am fair, thou

art fair, but not so fair as Marietta.’ Three passages point as clearly

to Bernhard Schmidt’s ‘Die Schönste’ (Griechische Märchen, p. 88), or

some other version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’:—‘In those days there was

a man with three daughters. He said, “I am going to the city, I ask you

what your souls desire me to bring you”’ (p. 394); ‘The eldest daughter

said, “O father, bring me a thousand pieces of linen, to make dresses

of”’ (p. 410); and ‘The middle daughter came, and she said, “Bring me,

O father, the heaven with the stars, the sea with the fishes, the

forest with the flowers”’ (p. 535). ‘My daughter, if your husband goes

home, and one of his people kisses him, he will forget you, and you

will remain in the forest’ (p. 555) must be an excerpt from a ‘Forsaken

Bride’ tale; and in ‘He became a church, and the girl turned into a

priest’ (p. 580) one recognises a widespread episode, which recurs in

our No. 34, ‘Made over to the Devil,’ and No. 50, ‘The Witch.’

Similarly, our No. 21, ‘The Deluded Dragon,’ a Bukowina-Gypsy version

of ‘The Valiant Little Tailor,’ is foreshadowed by—‘I am looking for

the biggest mountain, to seize you, and fling you there, that not a

bone of you may remain whole,’ on which Paspati observes that ‘this

story relates the combat of a young man with a dragon, and the speaker

here is the young man’ (p. 576). ‘She stuck a pin in her head; as soon

as she had done so, the young girl turned into a pretty and beautiful

bird’ (p. 514), may be matched from India (infra, p. 271); and ‘He gave

the old man a feather, and said to the old man, “Take it and carry it

to the maiden. I will come when she burns it,”’ is discussed on our p.

167. The ‘Beauty of the World’ (pp. 347, 511, 569) is familiar through

Hahn; and with Hahn i. p. 90, compare ‘The mare was pregnant, and his

wife, the queen, also was pregnant’ (p. 195). ‘The king said, “Come, my

brother, and restore her to human shape” (a story of a woman punished

by being turned into an ass),’ on p. 351, must belong to a variant of

our No. 25, ‘The Hen that laid Diamonds’; and our No. 7, ‘The Snake who

became the King’s Son-in-law,’ is suggested by two passages on pp. 262,

266: ‘He said to his mother, “I want the king’s daughter to wife”’ and

‘“How am I to plant trees, and make them grow up, and gather their

fruits?” (from a story in which, as the price of his daughter’s hand,

the father requires the suitor to plant trees in the morning and gather

their fruits in the evening).’ One can almost reconstruct a story out

of ‘We are forty cats; three are black, one is white’ (p. 411), ...

‘“Very early we go to the bath, and we strip ourselves naked, we take

off our skins, and we become human beings” (a story of forty pretty

women turned into cats),’ (p. 367), and ‘“When we are in the bath take

the skins and fling them in the fire”’ (p. 368; cf. also p. 537). That

story should belong to the husk-myth or swan-maiden type, as should

also perhaps this passage on p. 381—‘“Why did you go off?” “There was a

man.” “There was no man: a stick fell from the tree” (a story in which

a man surprises three maidens at the bath. Two go off, but the third,

whom the man is in love with, remains behind, and she holds this

discourse with her sisters as they go home).’ Cats are pretty often

referred to—e.g. ‘The cat found a shop where they sold honey. She

dipped her tail in it, and then rolled it in the ashes’ (p. 344); ‘The

cat sat down near them; she sees they are flinging away the precious

stone with the guts of the fish that had swallowed it’ (p. 189); ‘The

queen said to the lame cat’ (p. 195); and ‘The lame cat said to the

lad, “I’ll give you a bit of advice”’ (p. 245). To the same

story—perhaps a version of the well-known ‘Silly Women’—certainly

belong ‘His wife said, “Wait a bit till they put him in the coffin”’

(p. 295) and ‘They put him in the coffin; he rose up in the coffin; and

his wife said, “Hold! my husband who was in the coffin, is alive”’ (p.

227); and to the same story (? ‘Ali Baba’) doubtfully, these two

passages: ‘He packed the riches on his horses, and brought them at

midnight to his house, and he became a rich man’ (p. 349) and ‘He sat

down and sewed up the belly of his brother, whom the robbers had

killed’ (p. 422). Finally, some passages picked almost at random, to

illustrate the wealth of Paspati’s collections, are, on p. 472, ‘He is

the son of the King of the Serpents’; on p. 582, ‘I pray you earnestly,

O my wise king, have all the doors shut, and let no man come in, and

none go out’ (? ‘Master Thief’); on p. 195, ‘The King of India said, “I

have no son”’; on p. 564, ‘She went into the forest, she found a

shepherd, and she changed clothes with the shepherd, and took the road:

she went walking on a whole month’; on p. 505, ‘One taper burnt at her

head, the other at her feet’ (? a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ story); on p. 170,

‘I heard him, and I became a devil’; on p. 302, ‘She took a sword and

an arrow, and set off. She did not wish any one, even her sisters, to

know of her departure’; on p. 250, ‘The girl dressed herself, mounted

her horse, and took her sword’; on p. 251, ‘I become a bird for thee, O

apple of my eyes’; on p. 291, ‘I shall become a swallow, I shall sit on

thy neck, to kiss the freckle upon thy cheek’; on p. 259, ‘Said the

lad, “Who has taken my black bird?”’; on p. 356, ‘They lay down: the

lad placed the sword between himself and the maiden’ (cf. Grimm’s No.

60, i. 262); on p. 421, ‘The old man said, “I give you forty days to

find me”’; on p. 310, ‘The ass said, “All these years we have been with

you, and to me you give bones to eat, and the dog has had to eat

straw”’ [21]; and on p. 362, ‘The dead man goes last, the khodja goes

in front.’

They are not very lively reading, these little scraps; still, they

considerably extend our knowledge of Tchinghiané folk-tales. Of the six

stories given in full by Paspati I have had to omit two. One of these,

told by Christian nomads in the mixed style, is mixed indeed, more

incoherent than the tale of the Great Panjandrum, as witness this

sample:—‘The godfather sees her with flowers on her head. Song, “The

wolf will eat the lamb; The wolf will eat the turkey; The cat hit the

bear; A stranger was alarmed.”’ The other story, told by one of the

wild Zapáris, opens with a boon granted by an old man to the youngest

of a king’s five sons, to possess all the holes in the country. ‘He

went; in the forest he went; he found a hole. He stooped down over the

hole. “Come out of the hole, whoever is inside.” A woman came out; he

asked her, “What are you doing down there?” “There are two wolves; I

feed them.” “Feed them well; God be with you.” “And with you also.”

Again he went and went; he found a hole, and stooped down over that

hole. “Come out of the hole.” Out came a blackamoor,’ etc. It is not a

bad opening, but the story wanders off into drivel and obscenity. Even

of the four tales I do give, one, the ‘Story of the Bridge,’ is

valuable solely for its theme, of the master-builder Manóli and his

wife; if it is as old as it is corrupt, it should be of hoary

antiquity. But the three others are really good folk-tales, versions of

‘The Grateful Dead,’ ‘Faithful John,’ and Campbell of Islay’s ‘Knight

of Riddles.’ As always wherever possible, my translations are made

direct from the original Rómani.

Dr. Barbu Constantinescu.

Probe de Limba si Literatura Tiganilor din România, by Dr. Barbu

Constantinescu (Bucharest, 1878; 112 pp.), is an admirable collection

of seventy-five Roumanian-Gypsy songs and thirteen folk-tales, in the

original Rómani, with a Roumanian translation. The thirteen tales were

got from thirteen different Gypsies, and naturally they vary in merit,

the best to my thinking being ‘The Red King and the Witch,’ ‘The

Vampire,’ and ‘The Prince and the Wizard.’ I have given eleven of them,

with full annotations; of ‘The Stolen Ox’ and ‘The Prince who ate Men’

there are summaries on pp. 66 and 219. Dr. Barbu Constantinescu, who

was latterly a professor at Crajova, is, I learn, dead; he must have

known Rómani thoroughly, and may have left large collections.

Miklosich.

In part iv. of his great work, Ueber die Mundarten und die Wanderungen

der Zigeuner Europa’s (Vienna, 1874), Dr. Franz von Miklosich published

fifteen Gypsy folk-tales and nine songs from the Bukowina, in the

original Rómani, with an interlinear Latin translation. They were

collected by Professor Leo Kirilowicz, of Czernowicz, but when, where,

or from whom is not told; and they, alone of Gypsy folk-tales, have

been utilised by M. Emmanuel Cosquin to illustrate his admirable Contes

de Lorraine (2 vols. 1886). I have given them all in full, except ‘The

Rivals,’ part only of which is cited under No. 48, p. 181. ‘Tropsyn,’

‘The Enchanted City,’ and ‘The Jealous Husband’ are perhaps the best;

the last has a special interest through its relation to Cymbeline. In

his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Zigeunermundarten (part iv., Vienna

1878), Miklosich published three more folk-tales, communicated by

Professor Kirilowicz, Herr J. Kluch, and Dr. M. Gaster—the first a

Lying Story from the Bukowina (No. 35), the second, ‘The Three

Brothers,’ from the Hungarian Carpathians (No. 31), and the third, a

mere fragment, from Roumania. This fragment is on the familiar theme of

an emperor who till old age has had no heir; then his empress bears him

a son; but just as the child is being shown to the people, two eagles

carry it off. ‘Men,’ cries the empress, ‘if you will find my boy, I

will become your servant, to wait on you, to wash your feet, to drink

the water they are washed in, to quit my greatness, to make you king in

my stead, if only you will find my boy.’ After which the story becomes

hopeless nonsense, then suddenly stops—I fancy the Gypsy story-teller

had got too drunk to continue.

Wlislocki.

Märchen und Sagen der Transilvanischen Zigeuner (Berlin, 1886, 157

pages), by Dr. Heinrich von Wlislocki, differs from all other

Continental collections of Rómani folk-tales in this, that its

sixty-three stories are published for their intrinsic interest, not

solely as linguistic curiosities. They are given in German only, not in

the original. Hence they are open to a suspicion of having been here

and there touched up, a suspicion somewhat confirmed in the rare cases

where the original is appended in a footnote, as on p. 88. They are

interesting, but only as a ‘restored’ building may be interesting; one

doubts, one can never feel quite sure of anything. At the same time, I

believe that such ‘improvements’ apply solely to the language, not to

the subject-matter, of these stories. Their general genuineness is

attested by their occasional lacunæ, as in ‘Godfather Death,’ which is

closely identical with Grimm’s No. 44, but lacks the entire episode of

the sick princess. Besides, except that his work is dedicated to

Liebrecht, Dr. von Wlislocki gives no indication of acquaintance with

the subject of folk-tales, whilst he has approved himself a master of

Rómani by his Grammar of the Dialect of the Transylvanian Gypsies

(Leipzig, 1884). He tells us in the preface to his Märchen that for

several months of the summer of 1883 he wandered with a band of tented

Gypsies through Transylvania and south-east Hungary, and that during

his wanderings he collected these sixty-three stories, every one of

which he was careful to verify from the lips of a second member of the

race. His little work is easily accessible to every folklorist, so to

the folklorists I leave the task of analysing its stories in detail,

premising merely that, like their predecessors, they offer numerous

analogies to non-Gypsy folk-tales, but that fourteen of them bear a

distinctively Gypsy character, especially Nos. 15, 24, 31, 36, 51, 55.

Haltrich also gives some Transylvanian-Gypsy stories (Zur Volkskunde

der siebenbürgischen Sachsen, Vienna, 1885); and Vladislav Kornel,

Ritter von Zielinski, contributed four Hungarian-Gypsy ones to the

Gypsy Lore Journal for April 1890, pp. 65–73.

Dr. R. von Sowa.

Die Mundart der Slovakischen Zigeuner (Göttingen, 1887), by Dr. Rudolf

von Sowa, of Brünn, is based on nineteen Slovak-Gypsy stories which he

collected at Teplicz in 1884–85, and nine of which are given in the

original Rómani without a translation. Dr. von Sowa also contributed

four Gypsy folk-tales—Slovak and Moravian—to the Gypsy Lore Journal;

and the Bohemian-Gypsy story of ‘The Three Dragons’ he sent me in

manuscript. His stories have a high value for the purposes of

comparison, but are inferior as stories to those of several other

collections. I have given eight of them—Nos. 12, 19, 22, 41, 42, 43,

44, 60.

Dr. Kopernicki.

Isidore Kopernicki, M.D. (1825–91), published in 1872 a German

monograph on Gypsy craniology, and, called from Bucharest to Cracow in

1870, collected thirty Polish-Gypsy folk-tales in 1875–77. A year or

two before his death he put out a prospectus of a projected work on

Rómani stories and songs, with a French translation; but the work never

found a publisher. Six, however, of his stories appeared in the Gypsy

Lore Journal, and are reproduced here, Nos. 45–50. They are one and all

so admirable as stories and valuable as folklore that I cannot but hope

some folklore society or some individual folklorist may purchase and

publish the entire collection—Madame Kopernicki, I believe, is still a

resident of Cracow.

John Roberts.

Twenty to thirty years ago I knew hundreds of Gypsies in most parts of

England and Wales. But the Rómani dialect was in those days my

all-in-all; I would walk or ride thirty miles, and feel richly rewarded

if I came back with two or three new words, such as mormússi, midwife,

or taltoráiro, crow. I knew little or nothing about folklore, and cared

less; the few stray odds and ends of it that I picked up among the

people are scattered mostly through my In Gypsy Tents (Edinb. 1880). At

Virginia Water, in 1872, I remember old Matty Cooper telling me how the

plaice went about calling out, ‘I’m the King of the Fishes,’ which was

why her mouth was made crooked (cf. Grimm’s No. 172, ‘The Sole’); and

from a Boswell in, I think, 1875, I got the lying story of ‘Happy

Boz’ll,’ which I give here, No. 36. But my one great find was my

lighting on the Welsh-Gypsy harper, John Roberts (1815–94), of Newtown

in Montgomeryshire. In Gypsy Tents contains a great deal about him and

by him (pp. 78–81, 94–99, 149–158, 197–216, 269–278, 290–294, 299–319,

372–377); here, then, it may suffice to say that, though not a

full-blooded Gypsy, he could speak Rómani, yes, and write Rómani, as no

other Gypsy I have ever met at home or on the Continent. I know,

indeed, of no other instance where the teller of folk-tales has also

been able himself to transcribe them. He wrote out for me the two long

folk-tales reprinted here (Nos. 54 and 55), and he had a wealth of

others: I fear that many of them have perished with him. He was one of

the finest of Welsh harpers; he spoke Welsh, English, and Rómani with

equal fluency; and he was a man besides of rare intelligence. His

tales, he would have it, were all derived from the Arabian Nights,

‘leastwise if it was not from my poor old mother, or else from my

grandmother, and she was a wonderful woman for telling stories.’

Mr. John Sampson.

I may regret my own missed opportunities the less, as English and Welsh

Gypsy folk-tales have found at length an ideal collector in my friend,

Mr. John Sampson, the librarian of University College, Liverpool. No

man could be better equipped for the task than he, as the nineteen

stories here of his collecting will amply prove. Long a master of

English Rómani, he has also during the last few years been making a

profound study of the ‘deep’ Welsh dialect, the best-preserved of all

the Gypsy dialects with the doubtful exception of that of the Turkish

Tchinghiané. His promised work on the subject is anxiously looked for.

But, more than this, he possesses the rare gift of being able to take

down a story in the very words, the very accents even, of its teller.

Hundreds of times have I listened to Gypsies’ talk, and in these

stories of his I seem to hear it again: a phonograph could not

reproduce it more faithfully. His ‘Tales in a Tent’ (Gypsy Lore

Journal, April 1892, pp. 199–211) contained in a charming setting, from

which, indeed, it has seemed a sin to wrench them, the three

English-Gypsy stories of ‘Bobby Rag,’ ‘De Little Fox,’ and ‘De Little

Bull-calf,’ given here as Nos. 51, 52, 53. They were got near

Liverpool—the middle one from Wasti Gray, and the two others from her

husband, Johnny Gray, who also told Mr. Sampson the story of ‘The Horse

that coined Golden Guineas.’ [22] Then in 1896 from Matthew Wood,

felling trees upon Cader Idris, and in 1897 from Cornelius Price in

Lancashire, Mr. Sampson heard twenty-seven Welsh-Gypsy stories, about

which he writes thus in letters:—

‘On the slopes of Cader I have laboured for days together taking down

these things in a sort of phrenzy. No work could be more exhausting. To

note every accent, to follow the story, and to keep the wandering wits

of my Rómani raconteur to the point, all helped to make it trying work.

For days together I have heard no English spoken, the Woods always

talking Rómani, and the Gentiles Welsh. It is as well I did so at the

time, for Matthew Wood has cleared his mountain of trees, and departed,

God knows whither. Three journeys into Wales, and many letters to

post-offices and police-stations, have failed to find him. Nor can I

chance upon his mother again. Matthew got these stories from his

grandmother, Black Ellen, who, he says, knew two hundred stories, many

of them so long that their narration occupied four or five hours. In

listening to these tales, I think what struck me most was the severity

of their style, reminiscent of Paspati’s and other Continental

collections. A single word serves often as a sentence—”Chalé,” they

ate; “Ratí,” it was night. The latter beats for compression the

Virgilian “Nox erat.” ... I have added lately to my tales to the number

of five or six, taken down chiefly in English from a South Welsh Gypsy

named Cornelius Price.... I have Cornelius’s pedigree somewhere among

my papers. The Prices are a South Wales family, not of the purest

descent, who entered Wales from Hereford some generations ago. Some of

them intermarried with the Ingrams. Cornelius is a son of Amos Price,

from whom my old tinker Murray got most of his Rómani lore, including

the version of the old ballad ‘Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave’ which

I sent to MacRitchie, and which he sent to Professor Child. It has

beautiful lines, like—

“She lifted up his dying head,

And kissed his cheek and chin,”

side by side with others like—

“And when he came to his brother dear,

He was in a hell of a fright.”

It is printed in Child’s collection. Cornelius got his stories from

Nebuchadnēzar Price, his uncle. I met him at Wavertree, near Liverpool,

but he has since left for Chester way, returning south. He is a man of

middle age, or rather younger, perhaps, say thirty-five, a pleasant,

harum-scarum fellow. His younger brother, he tells me, knows many more

tales than he himself.... Some of the best tales Price forgets, or only

remembers interesting fragments. Such as a story of a bull who fights a

—— query, what? If he conquers, he tells the hero, the stream will flow

down to him blood one side only, but, if he is defeated, blood each

side. The bull is defeated, and, following his instructions, the hero

cuts a thong from his tail upwards, finds in his body a “Sword of

Swiftness,” and makes a belt of the hide. Of what tale is this a

fragment? Cornelius assures me that his youngest brother knows thirty

to fifty very long tales.... Had I time, I believe I could collect

hundreds of such tales from English and Welsh Gypsies.’

(Three or four years ago I found myself in a library—I would not for

worlds say where—alone with a complete set of the forty Reports of the

Challenger Expedition. I drew out a volume reverently—its pages had

never been opened. Tastes differ, and I own that myself I should be

quite as much interested by the discovery (say) of a Welsh-Gypsy

version of the ‘Grateful Dead,’ as by eight hundred and odd pages on

the ‘Abdominal Secretions of the Lower Gasteropoda.’ Nay, I would even

venture to suggest that a fraction, a very small fraction, of the money

yearly devoted to the Endowment of Research by government, by our

colleges, and by individual generosity, might well be apportioned to

the collecting and preserving of English and Welsh Gypsy folk-tales.

Every year will make the task harder; but, as it is, I believe Mr.

Sampson could bag the whole lot in a couple of three months’ summer

holidays. Holidays, quotha! I wonder what Mr. Sampson would say to my

notion of holidays.)

Campbell of Islay.

Of the four stories which I cite (No. 73–76) from J. F. Campbell’s

Popular Tales of the West Highlands (4 vols. 1860–62), three were told

by John MacDonald, travelling tinker, and the fourth by his old father.

‘John,’ Hector Urquhart writes, ‘wanders all over the Highlands, and

lives in a tent with his family. He can neither read nor write. He

repeats some of his stories by heart fluently, and almost in the same

words. I have followed his recitation as closely as possible, but it

was exceedingly difficult to keep him stationary for any length of

time.’ To which Campbell himself adds:—‘The tinker’s comments on “The

Brown Bear of the Green Glen” I got from the transcriber. John himself

is a character. He is about fifty years of age. His father, an old

soldier, is alive and about eighty; and there are numerous younger

branches; and they were all encamped under the root of a tree in a

quarry close to Inverary, at Easter 1859. The father tells many

stories, but his memory is failing. The son told me several, and I have

a good many of them written down. They both recite; they do not simply

tell the story, but act it with changing voice and gesture, as if they

took an interest in it, and entered into the spirit and fun of the

tale. They belong to the race of “Cairds,” and are as much nomads as

the gipsies are. The father, to use the son’s expression, “never saw a

school.” He served in the 42d in his youth. One son makes horn spoons,

and does not know a single story; the other is a sporting character, a

famous fisherman, who knows all the lochs and rivers in the Highlands,

makes flies, and earns money in summer by teaching Southerns to fish.

His ambition is to become an under-keeper’ (i. 174–5).

There are three points to be specially noticed here. First, if I

mistake not, these two tinkers, father and son, are the only Gaelic

story-tellers whom Campbell describes as reciting and acting their

stories; he repeats the same of the son in a passage which I quote on

p. 288. Secondly, the father told ‘many stories,’ but one does not

learn what they were, except that Campbell got from him a version of

‘Osean after the Feen’ (ii. 106), that the son ‘argued points’ in the

story of ‘Conal Crovi’ (i. 142), and that he knew the story of the

‘Shifty Lad,’ though not well enough to repeat it (i. 353). ‘Many

stories’ should mean more than these three and the four of our text.

Lastly, these MacDonalds are said to ‘belong to the race of “Cairds,”

and to be as much nomads as the gipsies are.’ But the question arises,

Are they not Gypsies, or half-breed Gypsies, or quarter-breed Gypsies

at any rate? To the Gypsy Lore Journal for January 1891, pp. 319–20, D.

Fearon Ranking, LL.D., contributed this paper:—

Boat-dwelling Tinkers.

‘I spent the month of August this year (1890) at Crinan Harbour, in

Argyllshire, and there came for a few moments across a family of

“Tinklers,” who are, I fancy, worth following up for the sake of

getting from them a stock of words. I was one morning on my way to the

post-office at Crinan, and, lying at the slip in front of the office, I

saw a good-sized boat, which I knew did not belong to the place. I

crossed the road, and went down to see who the owners were. To my

surprise, I found they were a party of “Tinklers.” On questioning them

they told me that they always went about in this manner, sailing from

place to place on the West Coast and among the Islands, and making and

mending pots and pans. They had just put in for provisions, and were on

the point of sailing for Scarba. The boat was a good-sized fishing

smack, three-quarter decked, rigged, if I remember rightly, with a big

lug-sail and jib, and a small lug aft, but on this point I am not quite

certain. The party consisted of three men and two women, with two or

three children. They were stunted in appearance, and quite young; the

women reddish-haired, the men rather darker.

‘On a venture, I asked whether they spoke “Shelta,” [23] as I was

anxious to learn something of this language, of which I knew nothing.

One of the men said that they did speak it, and, on being questioned,

gave the names of several common objects mentioned by me.

Unfortunately, I had neither pencil nor paper with me, and was

therefore unable to make any notes, and, the words being entirely

strange to me, I could not retain them. The only word I can remember is

yergan = “tin.”

‘One of the men suddenly said, “But we have another language, which I

do not think any one knows but ourselves; it is not in any books.”

“What do you call a ‘boat’ in your language?” I said. To my great

astonishment, he replied, “Bero.” On my then asking for the words for

“man,” “woman,” and “child,” he gave mush or gairo, monisha, and chavo.

Feeling now tolerably sure of my ground, I said, “Kushto bero se duvo.”

He stared at me as if I had been a ghost, and, on my continuing with a

few more words, he called to one of the women in the boat and said,

“Come here, I never saw anything like this. Here is a gentleman who

knows our language as well as we know it ourselves.” I continued asking

the names of various common objects, such as “fire,” “water,” the names

of animals, parts of the body, etc., and soon noticed that for each

they had two or three names, one being always good “Rommanis,” the

other, I presume, “Shelta.” But my surprise was greatest when, on

asking the name for a “hen,” the answer was “moorghee,” and then, as an

afterthought, “kanni.” Now, can any one tell me where they got this

word “moorghee” from? I have never met with it among any “Rommani foki”

of my acquaintance, but know it only as the common Hindustani name for

a fowl. Is it an old word which has been lost by others, but retained

by this family? Or have they picked it up from some one of their number

who has been in India soldiering?

‘Another surprise was in store for me. On asking them where they got

this language from, one of the men said, “We got it from our

grandfather. He could speak it much better than we can,” and then

volunteered the information that this grandfather was a keeper to the

Duke of Argyll, and had supplied Campbell of Islay with many of the

Sgeulachdan in his Highland Tales. This must be either the John

M’Donald, travelling tinker, referred to by Mr. MacRitchie in his

article on the “Irish Tinkers and their Language” (Oct. 1889, p. 354),

or a relation of his. An account of this family will be found in the

notes to the tale of the “Brown Bear of the Green Glen” (Popular Tales,

vol. i. pp. 174–175). It mentions that the father had served in the

Forty-Second. Had he brought back this word moorghee with him from

India? One of the sons is mentioned as being a keen sportsman. No hint

is given, however, of their knowing any language but Gaelic. It would

probably have astonished Campbell of Islay to find that they were

masters of four tongues—Gaelic, Shelta, English, and Rommanis. It may

be noticed that the accounts of occupation do not quite tally, as these

tinklers distinctly stated that their grandfather was one of Argyll’s

keepers. I should like to know whether any of the sons did actually

hold such a post. This is all I could learn in an interview of, at the

most, twenty minutes.’

Dr. Ranking, my friend for a quarter of a century, has a thorough

knowledge of Rómani; I would trust his judgment as I would trust my

own. I have never myself come across any Tinklers of the West Coast,

but I have met scores in the Lothians and in the Border Country, and my

observations on these tally closely with Dr. Ranking’s. The Lowland

Tinklers have little or nothing of the Gypsy type, though they have a

marked type of their own—a bleached, washed-out, mongrel type; their

language has sunk to a mere gibberish, without the least trace of

inflection, as different from the Welsh-Gypsy dialect as Pidgin-English

from the English of Tennyson. None the less, side by side with such

thieves’ cant as mort, woman, dell, girl, beenlightment, daylight,

ruffie, devil, and patri, clergyman, that gibberish contains two or

three hundred good enough Rómani words, as chúri, knife, drom, road,

paúni, water, gad, shirt, and dústa lóvo, plenty money. Nay, a curious

point is that it retains a few Rómani words which have been almost or

wholly lost in the English and Welsh Gypsy dialects—shúkar, beautiful,

háro, sword, klísti, soldier, kálshes, breeches, and pówiski, gun. On

the other hand, Scottish thieves’ cant shows a much larger admixture of

words of Rómani origin than does the English. We possess no early

specimens of Scottish Rómani, but Scotland two centuries since would

seem to have had as true Gypsies as any Stanleys or Boswells or Herons

south of the Border. But the persecution of the race as a race lasted a

hundred years longer in Scotland than in England, and it is probable

that, whilst many of its chief members were hanged or drowned or

transported to America, others fled southward—one finds to-day the

Gaelic Gilderoy (‘red lad’) a Christian name among English Gypsies, and

such surnames as Baillie, Gregory, and Marshall. Those who remained

behind must have intermarried largely with Scottish vagrants, Irish

vagrants, gangrel bodies generally: the Gypsy stream broadened out, and

became correspondingly shallow. Nowadays, then, it is difficult to say

of the Faa-Blyths, Taits, Norrises, Baillies, Douglases, or any other

of the Tinklers I have met, whether they are more Gypsies or Gentiles;

English Gypsies assuredly would not regard them as Gypsies. Still, they

have all a dash of the Gypsy, stronger or weaker; and with these

boat-dwelling Tinklers, whom Dr. Ranking describes, the dash was

decidedly stronger. There can hardly be any doubt that the grandfather

whom they spoke of as a keeper to the Duke of Argyll, was John

MacDonald the younger, who at Inverary in 1859 had an ambition to

become an underkeeper. [24]

Kounavine.

Lastly, in the Gypsy Lore Journal for April and July 1890, were two

long articles by Dr. A. B. Elysseeff—‘Kounavine’s Materials for the

Study of the Gypsies.’ According to these, Michael Ivanovitch Kounavine

(1820–81) studied medicine at Moscow, and then having passed as doctor,

for the thirty-five years 1841–76 wandered from Gypsy camp to Gypsy

camp in Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia. Eight of those years were

passed amongst the Gypsies of Germany, Austria, Southern France, Italy,

England, and Spain; twelve amongst those of Asia Minor, Armenia,

Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Iran, Hindustan, and the Deccan; ten amongst

Russian Gypsies; and then from the Caucasus ‘the indefatigable

traveller followed the transition of the European Gypsies into those of

Kurdistan, and all along the Ural Mountains into those of Central Asia

and Turan, on this occasion revisiting India and the ranges of

Tian-Shan and the Himalayas.’ Meanwhile he collected an ‘immense store

of materials, consisting of 123 tales, 80 traditions and legends, 62

ritual songs, and 120 smaller products of Gypsy poetry.... In the

ancient legends the mythological elements assert themselves most

strongly, and the characteristic features of the Hindu mythology are

there so evident, that even the names in these tales recall the

analogous divinities of the Hindu theology. These are Baramy, the

proto-divinity, Jandra, the sun-god, Laki, Matta, Anromori, and others,

in which one cannot fail to recognise the Hindu Brama, Indra, Lakshmi,

Máta (Prithik, earth-mother), as well as the Zendic name of Ariman....

In the traditions and historical narratives one meets with classic

names of towns known to the Greek geographers, such as Batala, Pourini,

Espadi, Rikoi, Bikin, and Babili, in which it is not difficult to

recognise the ancient towns Pattala, Poura, Aspadana (Ispahan), Rhagæ,

Beikind, and Babylon, cited by Arrian and other historians and

geographers.’

These are the merest pickings from Dr. Kounavine’s ‘colossal’

collections, which perished, alas! with him somewhere in Siberia, and

are known to us only through an elaborate abstract drawn up in 1878 by

Dr. Elysseeff, since himself also dead. First printed in the

Transactions of the Russian Geographical Society (1882), that abstract,

thanks to Dr. Kopernicki, appeared in English in the Gypsy Lore

Journal, where it occupied twenty-five pages. It was quite right it

should appear there; still, I cannot feel absolutely certain that there

ever was any Dr. Kounavine at all. If there was, I am certain that

nine-tenths of the discoveries claimed for him are the merest

moonshine. To maintain that the Gypsies of England, France, Spain, and

Italy arrived at their present habitats from Africa by way of Sicily,

is, as has been shown, to evince a crass ignorance of the Rómani

language. Equally absurd is it to maintain that ‘every Gypsy dialect

contains a large number of words of non-Aryan origin: Aramaic, Semitic,

and even Mongol words form 25 per cent. of the Gypsy vocabulary taken

in its largest sense.’ For this implies that Aramaic is non-Semitic, as

though one should speak of Gaelic and Celtic, or of German and

Teutonic. Again, what of the sketch-map, according to which Dr.

Kounavine seems to have found ‘fragmentary and confused traces of a

primitive mythology’ somewhere about Newtown in Montgomeryshire and

round the Cambridgeshire Wash? Newtown is a Welsh-Gypsy centre (I had

shown it be such in 1880); but unquestionably its Gypsies would have

retained some recollection of a visit from a mysterious Rómani-speaking

foreigner, even after the lapse of thirty or forty years.

Theory as to Gypsy Folk-tales.

So there the folklorists have all that is essential—or rather all that

I can give of the essential—for the right understanding of the

following seventy-six folk-tales. And there I should have been quite

content to leave them, did I not wish to disavow the theory imputed to

me mistakenly by my friend, Mr. Joseph Jacobs. In his More English

Fairy Tales (1894), p. 232, he speaks of ‘Mr. Hindes Groome’s

contention (in Transactions Folk-Lore Congress) for the diffusion of

all folk-tales by means of Gypsies as colporteurs.’ The paper I read

before the Folklore Congress of 1891 was not on folk-tales at all, but

on English popular superstitions; I certainly never contended that

their diffusion was solely due to the Gypsies. Whilst as to Gypsy

folk-tales, the first thing I ever wrote about them was forty-three

lines in the Encyclopædia Britannica (vol. x. 1879, p. 615), which,

with but forty stories to go by, concluded:—‘At present our information

is far too scanty to warrant any definite conclusion; but, could it

once be shown that the Asiatic possess the same stories as the European

Gypsies, it might be necessary to admit that Europe owes a portion of

its folklore to the Gypsies.’ And the last thing I wrote on the subject

was twenty-seven lines in Chambers’s Encyclopædia (vol. v. 1892, p.

489), and they wound up:—‘According to Benfey, Reinhold Köhler,

Ralston, Cosquin, Clouston, and other folklorists, most of the popular

stories of Europe are traceable to Indian sources. But how? by what

channels? One channel, perhaps, was the Gypsies.’

Gypsy Variants.

That seven years ago was my theory, if it may be dignified with so

high-sounding a title; and that is my theory still. And it seems to me

even now, that, though now we possess 160 Gypsy folk-tales, our store

is still far too scanty to warrant any definite conclusion. We want the

unpublished materials of Paspati and Kopernicki; we want Dr. von Sowa

and Mr. Sampson to complete their collections; and we want, too, the

Gypsy folk-tales, if such there be, of Spain, Portugal, Brazil, the

Basque Country, Italy, Alsace, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, and

Greece—above all, of Africa and Asia. [25] If a word like páni, water,

is found in every Gypsy dialect from Persia to South America, from

Finland to Egypt, one reasonably regards it as a true Rómani word, as

one that the Gypsies have brought from their eastern home. Similarly,

if a folk-tale could be shown to have an equally wide distribution

among the Gypsies, we might reasonably believe that the Gypsies had

brought it with them. But at present we know of no such wide

distribution. We have five Gypsy versions of ‘The Master Thief’ (Nos.

11, 12), one from Roumania, two from Hungary, and two from Wales; and

two of the cognate story, ‘Tropsyn’ (Nos. 27, 28), from the Bukowina

and Wales. We have two of ‘The Vampire’ (No. 5), Roumanian and

Hungarian; three of ‘The Bad Mother’ (Nos. 8, 9), Roumanian,

Bukowinian, and Hungarian; two of ‘Mare’s Son’ (Nos. 20, 58),

Bukowinian and Welsh; three of ‘It all comes to Light’ (Nos. 17, 18,

19), Bukowinian, Roumanian, and Slovak; two of ‘The Rich and the Poor

Brother’ (Nos. 30, 31), Bukowinian and Hungarian; three of ‘The Robber

Bridegroom’ (No. 47), Polish, Hungarian, and Welsh; three of ‘The

Master Smith’ (Nos. 59, 60), Welsh, Catalonian, and Slovak; two of ‘The

Golden Bush and the Good Hare’ (Nos. 49, 75), Polish and Scotch; and

four of ‘The Deluded Dragon’ (Nos. 21, 22), Bukowinian, Slovak,

Transylvanian, and Turkish. It is something to have established this

much; and it will be seen how enormously Mr. Sampson has extended the

area of Gypsy folk-tales since 1896. But it still needs much greater

extension.

Unique Features.

An absolutely unique story or incident is a very rare find in folklore.

A few stories in the present collection I have not been able to match,

e.g. ‘The Three Princesses and the Unclean Spirit’ (No. 10), ‘The Red

King and the Witch’ (14), ‘The Prince and the Wizard’ (15),

‘Pretty-face’ (29), ‘A Girl who was sold to the Devil’ (46), and ‘The

Black Dog of the Wild Forest’ (72). Then as to incidents, I have met

with no non-Gypsy parallel to the somersault that in Gypsy stories

almost invariably precedes a transformation (cf. footnote 2 on p. 16).

I have met with none to the striking ordeal in ‘Mare’s Son’ (No. 20):—

‘He went to his brothers. “Good-day to you, brothers. You fancied I

should perish. If you acted fairly by me, toss your arrows up in

the air, and they will fall before you; but if unfairly, then they

will fall on your heads.” All four tossed up their arrows, and they

stood in a row. His fell right before him, and theirs fell on their

heads, and they died.’

‘The Seer’ (No. 23) offers a variant:—

‘And he said, “Good-day to you, brothers. You fancied I had

perished. You have pronounced your own doom. Come out with me, and

toss your swords up in the air. If you acted fairly by me, it will

fall before you; but if unfairly, it will fall on your head.” The

three of them tossed up their swords, and that of the youngest fell

before him, but theirs fell on their head, and they died.’

Then there is the fine conception, of frequent occurrence in

Wlislocki’s Transylvanian-Gypsy stories, that the sun in the morning

sets forth as a little child, by noon has grown to a man, and comes

home at eventide weary, old, and grey. [26] And this again, from ‘The

Hen that laid Diamonds’ (No. 25):—

‘The emperor there was dead, and they took his crown and put it in

the church; whosever head the crown falls on, he shall be emperor.

And men of all ranks came into the church; and the three boys came.

And the eldest went before, and slipped into the church; and the

crown floated on to his head “We have a new emperor.” They raised

him shoulder-high, and clad him in royal robes.’

The episode is reminiscent of ‘Excalibur’ in the old Arthurian legend.

The story in which it occurs is identical with Hahn’s No. 36, but there

the episode is wholly wanting. The multiplication of such seemingly

unique Gypsy stories and incidents would certainly favour a belief in

the originality of the Gypsies, would suggest that some at least of

their stories are at first-hand, and not derived from Greeks, Roumans,

Slavs, Teutons, or Celts.

Still, nothing would surprise me less than to come on non-Gypsy

versions of one or all of these stories or incidents. The great mass of

the collection can be paralleled from Grimm, Asbjörnsen, Hahn,

Campbell, Cosquin, etc. Thus my No. 63 is Grimm’s ‘Our Lady’s Child’

(No. 3); No. 57 his ‘Youth who went forth to learn what Fear was’ (No.

4); No. 2 his ‘Faithful John’ (No. 6); No. 21 his ‘Valiant Little

Tailor’ (No. 20); No. 38 his ‘Devil with the Three Golden Hairs’ (No.

29); No. 47 his ‘Robber Bridegroom’ (No. 40); No. 70 his ‘Frederick and

Catherine’ (No. 59); No. 25 his ‘Two Brothers’ (No. 60); No. 68 his

‘Little Peasant’ (No. 61); No. 59 his ‘Brother Lustig’ (No. 81) and

‘Old Man made Young again’ (No. 147); No. 32 his ‘King of the Golden

Mountains’ (No. 92); No. 17 his ‘Three Little Birds’ (No. 96); Nos. 55

and 73 his ‘Water of Life’ (No. 97); No. 43 his ‘Skilful Huntsman’ (No.

111); No. 25 his ‘Ferdinand the Faithful’ (No. 126); No. 41 his ‘Shoes

that were danced to Pieces’ (No. 133); Nos. 20 and 58 his ‘Strong Hans’

(No. 166); and Nos. 11 and 12 his ‘Master Thief’ (No. 192); besides

which his ‘Cinderella’ (No. 21), ‘Godfather Death’ (No. 44), and ‘The

Sole’ (No. 172) are known to be current among the Gypsies. The Gypsies,

then, by the showing even of our present meagre store of Gypsy

folk-tales, have over ten per cent. of Grimm’s entire collection.

Which are the better, the Gypsy versions, or the non-Gypsy versions,

can only be definitely determined when we can feel pretty sure of

possessing the best Gypsy versions procurable. Take, for example, our

story of ‘The Vampire’ (No. 5). The wretched Hungarian-Gypsy version of

Dr. Friedrich Müller (1869) could not for a moment compare with

Ralston’s fine Russian story of ‘The Fiend,’ but the Roumanian-Gypsy

version of Barbu Constantinescu (1878) quite well can. The standard of

Gypsy folk-tales should clearly be taken from the best, not the

poorest, specimens; and the standard by that rule is high. Indeed, ‘The

Red King and the Witch’ to me appears as good as anything in the whole

field of folklore; and ‘Ashypelt,’ ‘The Jealous Husband,’ and half a

dozen more of my collection seem only less good than it. But, of

course, one’s own geese are all swans.

Literary Sources.

A curious point about these Gypsy stories is that in three or four of

them one recognises an incident or a whole plot which, unless it be

Gypsy, the Gypsies would seem to have derived from books. Here, for

instance, are two parallel passages from No. 120 of the Gesta Romanorum

and from the Bukowina-Gypsy story of ‘The Seer’ (No. 23):—

GESTA. GYPSY TALE.

Where to bend his steps he knew The youngest went into the woods,

not, but arising, and fortifying and he was hungry, and he found an

himself with the sign of the apple-tree with apples, and he ate

Cross, he walked along a certain an apple, and two stag’s horns

path until he reached a deep grew. And he said, ‘What God has

river, over which he must pass. given me I will bear.’ And he went

But he found it so bitter and hot, onward, and crossed a stream, and

that it even separated the flesh the flesh fell away from him. And

from the bones. Full of grief, he he kept saying, ‘What God has

conveyed away a small quantity of given me I will bear. Thanks be to

that water, and when he had God.’ And he went further, and

proceeded a little further, felt found another apple-tree. And he

hungry. A tree, upon which hung said, ‘I will eat one more apple,

the most tempting food, incited even though two more horns shall

him to eat; he did so, and grow.’ When he ate it, the horns

immediately became a leper. He dropped off. And he went further,

gathered also a little of the and again found a stream. And he

fruit, and conveyed it with him. said, ‘God, the flesh has fallen

After travelling for some time, he from me, now my bones will waste

arrived at another stream, whose away; but even though they do, yet

virtue was such that it restored will I go.’ And he crossed the

the flesh to his feet; and eating stream; his flesh grew fairer than

of a second tree, he was cleansed ever.

of his leprosy.

Which is the better here, the nearer the original—the Geste of the

Romans, or that of the Romanies? It is hard to determine; but of this I

feel pretty sure, that, if any one were asked to say which of these two

passages was monkish and which Gypsy, he would decide wrongly: there is

such a tone of pious fortitude about ‘The Seer.’ The Welsh-Gypsy story

of ‘The Three Wishes’ (No. 65) looks as though it were taken straight

from Giambattista Basile’s tale of ‘Peruonto,’ i. 3, in the Pentamerone

(1637)—a none too accessible work, one would fancy, and a tale that has

not passed into popular folklore. Then there is the fine Bukowina-Gypsy

story of ‘The Jealous Husband’ (No. 33), derived apparently from the

novella ii. 9 of Boccaccio’s Decamerone (1358), the prototype of

Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Except that the Gypsy story is localised on

the Danube, the plot is almost identical—the wager, the chest, the

theft of the ring, the mole. It sounds unlikely that Gypsies, the most

illiterate race in Europe, should have enriched their stock of

folk-tales from Boccaccio. Still, that is how folklorists would

probably account for the identity of the two stories, if those stories

stood alone. But they do not; there are also four folk-tales at least

to account for—Roumanian, German, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish Gaelic.

And Campbell’s Gaelic story of ‘The Chest,’ whilst like Boccaccio’s, is

in some points still liker that of the Bukowina Gypsies. On the whole,

it seems easier to suppose that Boccaccio got his story directly or

indirectly from the Gypsies, than that they got theirs from Boccaccio.

But Gypsies, it will be urged, were unknown in Italy in Boccaccio’s

day. That is by no means so certain. There was the komodromos with the

blind yellow dog, who came from Italy in 544 A.D.; and there was the

Neapolitan painter, Antonio Solario, ‘lo Zingaro,’ who was born about

1382. [27] And even though Boccaccio himself could never have seen

Gypsies, many of his countrymen must have come across them outside of

Italy—in Greece, in Corfu, in Crete, and in other parts of the Levant.

Questions of Date.

Sometimes, however, a date does seem to preclude the notion that the

dissemination of this or that folk-tale can have been due to Gypsies.

The ‘Grateful Dead,’ the first of our collection, is a case in point.

The Turkish-Gypsy version is excellent—as good, indeed, as any known to

me; but the story seems to have been current in England as early, at

any rate, as 1420—the date assigned to the metrical romance of ‘Sir

Amadas.’ Again, according to Mr. Jacobs’ More Celtic Fairy Tales, p.

229, ‘the most curious and instructive parallel to Campbell’s West

Highland tale of “Mac Iain Direach” [= our No. 75] is that afforded by

the Arthurian romance of Walewein or Gawain, now only extant in Dutch,

which, as Professor W. P. Ker has pointed out in Folk-Lore, v. 121,

exactly corresponds to the popular tale, and thus carries it back in

Celtdom to the early twelfth century at the latest.’ Only, how from

Celtdom has the story wandered to the Polish Gypsies of Galicia, whose

tale of ‘The Golden Bush and the Good Hare’ (No. 49) is clearly

identical?

Indian Parallels.

I raise these objections myself, knowing that, if I did not, some one

else would certainly do so, with the gleeful remark, ‘Down goes the

silly theory of the dispersion of folk-tales by Gypsies.’ By no means,

necessarily. The theory may be inapplicable in these and in other

cases; but what will the folklorists make of another Polish-Gypsy

story, the ‘Tale of a Foolish Brother and of a Wonderful Bush’ (No.

45)? Of it we find a variant in the Welsh-Gypsy story of ‘The Dragon’

(No. 61), and a most unmistakable version in the Indian fairy-tale of

‘The Monkey Prince’ (Maive Stokes, No. 10, p. 41). The connection,

indeed, between the Gypsy and the Indian folk-tale seems scarcely less

obvious than that between páni, water, in Rómani, and páni, water, in

Hindustani. This, I think, must be granted; but what, then, of the

non-Gypsy versions, cited on p. 161, from Russia, Norway, and Sicily?

Or take the Turkish-Gypsy story of ‘Baldpate’ (No. 2). It is identical,

on the one hand, with Grimm’s ‘Faithful John’ (No. 6) and many more

European versions, and, on the other hand, with the latter half of

‘Phakir Chand’ (Lal Behari Day’s Folk-tales of Bengal, pp. 39–52). Is

it not possibly the link between them? And may not similar links be

discernible in these eight parallels, where the notes on the Gypsy

tales will supply the exact references:—

INDIAN. GYPSY. EUROPEAN.

1. The Son of Seven = The Bad Mother (No. = The Blue Belt

Mothers, etc. 8), etc. (Norse), etc.

2. The Boy with the Moon = It all comes to Light = Grimm’s Three Little

on his Forehead, etc. (No. 17), etc. Birds, etc.

3. Prince Lionheart, = Mare’s Son (No. 20), = Grimm’s Strong Hans,

etc. etc. etc.

4. Valiant Vicky, the = The Deluded Dragon = Grimm’s Valiant

Brave Weaver, etc. (No. 21), etc. Little Tailor, etc.

5. The Two Brothers, = The Hen that laid = Grimm’s Two Brothers,

etc. Diamonds (No. 25). etc.

6. The Weaver as Vishnu = The Winged Hero (No. = Andersen’s Flying

(Sansk.). 26). Trunk, etc.

7. The Two Bhûts, etc. = The Rich and the Poor = Grimm’s Two

Brother (No. 30), Travellers, etc.

etc.

8. Story cited by = The Witch (No. 50), = Cosquin’s Chatte

Ralston. etc. Blanche, etc.

There is also a frequent identity of incident in Gypsy and Indian

folk-tales. Thus, in the Hungarian-Gypsy version of ‘The Vampire’ (No.

5), the king sends his coachman to pluck the flower that has grown from

the maiden’s grave; the coachman cannot, but the king himself can, and

takes the flower home. Just so the Bel-Princess, thrown into a well,

turns into a lotus-flower, which recedes from the villager who tries to

pluck it, but floats into the prince’s hand (Maive Stokes’s Indian

Fairy Tales, p. 145; also p. 10). Fruits causing pregnancy are common

in Gypsy as in Indian folk-tales (cf. Notes to No. 16); and God sends

St. Peter with them in the former just as Mahádeo does an old fakír in

the latter. The sleeping beauty in ‘The Winged Hero’ (No. 26) lies

lifeless on the bed, and is awakened only by the removal of the candle

from her head; in ‘The Boy with the Moon on his Forehead’ (Lal Behari

Day’s Folk-tales of Bengal, p. 251) it is two little sticks of gold and

silver that revive the suspended animation of the young lady sleeping

on the golden bedstead. The rescue of the eaglets from the dragon in

‘Mare’s Son’ (No. 20) exactly matches the rescue of the two birds from

the huge serpent in the Bengal ‘Story of Prince Sobur’ (p. 134); and

the princess in the tree in that same Bengal story (p. 126) comes very

near the wife in the oak in the Polish-Gypsy ‘Tale of a Girl who was

sold to the Devil’ (No. 46). The robbers in a Moravian-Gypsy story (No.

43) break through the wall of a castle like the robbers of Scripture

and of Indian folk-tales; and one very curious feature, which we can

trace across two continents, is the feather, hair, or wing of a bird,

beast, or insect, the burning of which, or sometimes the mere thinking

on which, summons its former possessor to the hero’s aid. It occurs in

this passage from an unpublished Turkish-Gypsy story (Paspati, p.

523):—‘He gave the old man a feather, and he said to the old man, “Take

it and carry it to your daughter, and if she puts it in the fire I will

come.”’ It occurs, too, in the Roumanian-Gypsy story of ‘The Three

Princesses and the Unclean Spirit’ (No. 10), in the Bukowina-Gypsy

story of ‘The Enchanted City’ (No. 32), and in the Polish-Gypsy ‘Tale

of a Girl who was sold to the Devil’ (No. 46). It is by no means a

common feature in Western folklore, but it occurs in Basile’s

Pentamerone, iv. 3, and in the Irish story of ‘The Weaver’s Son and the

Giant of the White Hill’ (Curtin, pp. 64–77) the hero gets a bit of

wool from the ram, a bit of fin from the salmon, and a feather from the

eagle, with injunctions to take them out when in any difficulty, and so

summon all the rams, salmon, or eagles of the world to his assistance.

As I show in the notes to No. 46, the idea is of frequent occurrence in

the folk-tales of the Levant [28] and of India. In Mrs. Steel’s

Wide-awake Stories, p. 32, the demon says to the Faithful Prince, ‘Take

this hair with you, and, when you need help, burn it, then I will come

immediately to your assistance.’ And in the Arabian Nights (‘Conclusion

of the Story of the Ladies of Baghdad’) the Jinneeyeh gives the first

lady a lock of her hair, and says, ‘When thou desirest my presence,

burn a few of these hairs, and I will be with thee quickly, though I

should be beyond Mount Kaf.’

The list, I expect, of identical plots and incidents could be largely

extended even from my collection by M. Cosquin or any one else well

versed in Indian folklore. Yet, as it stands, that list goes some way

to corroborate my theory. One obvious objection may be anticipated. A

folk-tale, as told to-day in India, need not be more primitive, more

faithful to the original, than the same folk-tale as told to-day in

Greece or Germany. The same wear and tear may have affected the story

that stayed at home as has affected the story that wandered westward a

thousand or two thousand years ago; it may have affected it in a very

much greater degree. That is just what we find in language; the Rómani

vast, hand, comes much nearer the Sanskrit hasta than does the

Hindustani hāth. Another point may also be illustrated from language.

The same word, or two kindred words, may have reached the same

destination by different routes and at widely different periods. The

Gypsies brought with them páni, water, to England, whither centuries

after came the ‘brandy-pawnee’ of Anglo-Indians; páni is a far-away

cousin of ae, aqueous, aquarium, etc. Brother and fraternal, [29] foot

and pedestrian, are two out of hundreds of similar instances. In much

the same way, it need not be any positive objection to the late

transmission of a folk-tale to Norway or England, that an earlier form

of that folk-tale already existed there. Because in the Nibelungenlied

one finds a striking parallel to an episode in the Bukowina-Gypsy story

of ‘The Prince, his Comrade, and Nastasa the Fair’ (No. 24), it does

not follow that that story is necessarily derived from the

Nibelungenlied. Still, the difficulty of discriminating between the

earlier and the more recent forms of a folk-tale must be enormous—it

may be, insuperable.

Tokens of Recent Diffusion.

Sometimes, however, it seems to me, we get sure tokens of recent

diffusion. Thus in the folk-tales to which Sir George Cox, Professor de

Gubernatis, and their fellow-mythologists assign a prehistoric

antiquity, one of the commonest incidents is where the hero and

heroine, flying from a demon, magician, or ogre (the heroine’s father

often), transform themselves into a church and priest. We find the

incident in Lorraine, Brittany, Picardy, many parts of both Germany and

Italy, the Tyrol, Transylvania, Hungary, Croatia, Russia, Spain,

Portugal, and Brazil, as well as among the Gypsies of Turkey, the

Bukowina, and Galicia (cf. Cosquin, i. 106; and my own pp. 127, 196).

What was the prehistoric form of the church? Was it a tope, a stone

circle, something of the kind? That well may be. But how comes it that

the development of the prehistoric form has in all these

widely-separated countries reached exactly the same stage, and there

stopped? Why has not the stone circle become in one case a stone-heap

with a stone-breaker, in another a pound with a horse in it, in a third

a field with a rubbing-post? Why always the modern Christian notion of

a church? But the difficulty vanishes if one may suppose that the

Gypsies, starting from the Balkan Peninsula at a date when churches

were familiar objects, which a pursuer would naturally pass, carried

with them the modern version of the story to Russia, Spain, and the

other countries in which it is told to-day. Similarly, in Gypsy

stories, and in stories current in countries wide apart, one finds such

incidents as the hero falling in love through a portrait, the hero

playing cards with the devil, the hero carrying a Bellerophon letter,

the hero looking through an all-seeing telescope. Such stories in their

original form may be of indefinable antiquity; but the recurrence of

their developed form amongst Slavs and Teutons and Celts would seem to

be due to recent transmission, unless one is prepared to maintain that

our primæval Aryan ancestors were acquainted with portrait-painting,

with playing-cards, with the art of writing, and with telescopes.

The Anthropological Theory.

In his Introduction to Mrs. Hunt’s admirable translation of Grimm, Mr.

Andrew Lang thus expounded his ‘Anthropological’ theory of folk-tales:—

‘As to the origin of the wild incidents in Household Tales, let any

one ask himself this question: Is there anything in the frequent

appearance of cannibals, in kinship with animals, in magic, in

abominable cruelty, that would seem unnatural to a savage?

Certainly not; all these things are familiar to his world. Do all

these things occur on almost every page of Grimm? Certainly they

do. Have they been natural and familiar incidents to the educated

German mind during the historic age? No one will venture to say so.

These notions, then, have survived in peasant tales from the time

when the ancestors of the Germans were like Zulus or Maoris or

Australians.’

Gypsy Savagery.

It is an interesting, the most interesting theory; still I cannot

forbear pointing out that many of Mr. Lang’s survivals of dead Teutonic

savagery are living realities in Gypsy tents. Matty Cooper, discoursing

to his ‘dear little wooden bear,’ and offering it beer to drink; ‘Gypsy

Mary,’ who ‘washed herself away from God Almighty’; Riley Smith and

Emily Pinfold, who both ‘sold their blood to the Devil’; Mrs. Draper,

who vowed that, sooner than touch beer or spirits, she would go to

Loughton churchyard, and drink the blood of her dead son lying there;

Riley Bosville with his two wives, and old Charles Pinfold with his

three; Lementina Lovell, who heard the fairy music; her grandson,

Dimiti, who lay awake once in Snaky Lane, and watched the little

fairies in the oak-tree; and Ernest Smith (1871–98), who one July night

in the grounds of the Edinburgh Electrical Exhibition of 1890 saw ‘two

dear little teeny people, about two feet high, and he upp’d and flung

stones at ’em’—I myself have known eight of these Gypsies, and kinsfolk

of the two others. It is not sixteen years since an English Gypsy girl,

to work her vengeance on her false Gentile lover, cut the heart out of

a living white pigeon, and flung the poor bird, yet struggling, on the

fire. It is barely fifty years since old Mrs. Smith was buried at

Troston, near Ixworth, after travelling East Anglia for half a century

with a sparrow, which, like the raven in Grimm’s story, told her all

manner of secrets. (Cf. Mr. Lang’s ‘4. Savage idea.—Animals help

favoured men and women.’) Then, there is the Gypsy system of tabu, by

which wife and child renounce for ever the favourite food or drink of

the dead husband or father, or the name of the deceased is dropped

clean out of use, any survivors who happen to bear it adopting another.

There is the belief in the evil eye; there are caste-like rules of

ceremonial purity; and on the Continent there is, or was lately, actual

idolatry—tree-worship among German Gypsies, and the worship of the

moon-god, Alako, among their brethren of Scandinavia. [Cannibalism.]

Nor even for cannibalism need Mr. Lang go far back or far afield. In

1782 in Hungary, next door to Germany, forty-five Gypsies, men and

women, were beheaded, broken on the wheel, quartered alive, or hanged,

for cannibalism. Arrested first by way of wise precaution, they were

racked till they confessed to theft and murder, then were brought to

the spot where they said their victims should be buried, and, no

victims forthcoming, were promptly racked again. ‘We ate them,’ at last

was their despairing cry, and straightway the Gypsies were hurried to

the scaffold; straightway the newspapers all over Europe rang with

blood-curdling narratives of ‘Gypsy cannibalism.’ Then, when it all was

over, the Emperor Joseph sent a commission down, the outcome of whose

investigations was that nobody was missing, that no one had been

murdered—but the Gypsies. That was in Hungary, a century ago; but even

in England, in 1859, a judge seems to have entertained a similar

suspicion. In that year, at the York assizes, a Gypsy lad, Guilliers

Heron, was tried for a robbery, of which, by the bye, he was innocent.

‘One of the prisoner’s brothers’ (I quote from the Times of Thursday,

10th March, p. 11), ‘said they were all at tea with the prisoner at

five o’clock in their tent, and, when asked what they had to eat, he

said they had a “hodgun” cooked, which is the provincial name for a

hedgehog. His Lordship (Mr. Justice Byles): “What do you say you

had—cooked urchin?” Gypsy: “Yes, cooked hodgun. I’m very fond of cooked

hodgun” (with a grin). His Lordship’s mind seemed to be filled with

horrible misgivings, when the meaning of the provincialism was

explained amid much laughter.’ Cannibalism is a common feature of Gypsy

folk-tales, as this collection will show; but it is far commoner, and

on a far grander scale, in the folk-tales of India, where a rakshasi

makes nothing of polishing off the entire population of a city, plus

the goats and sheep, horses and elephants. How does Mr. Lang account

for this, for Germany remained savage long ages after India? I rather

fancy, though I cannot be certain, that cannibalism in folk-tales

tapers off pretty regularly westward from India. [30]

Gypsy Migrations.

In the Academy for 11th June 1887 Mr. Lang objected: ‘Can M. Cosquin

show that South Siberia and Zanzibar got their contes by oral

transmission from India within the historical period? This is doubtful;

but it seems still more unlikely that tales which originated in India

could have reached Barra and Uist in the Hebrides, and Zululand, and

the Samoyeds—not to mention America—by oral transmission, and all

within the historical period.’ My pp. xv–xviii and xxxv–xlv furnish a

fairly good answer to much of this objection, for they show that during

the last three centuries recent immigrants from India, possessed of

folk-tales, have been passing to and fro between Lorraine and Italy,

Scotland and North America, Portugal and Africa and Brazil, Poland and

Siberia, Spain and Louisiana, the Basque Country and Africa, Hungary

and Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, and Algeria, the Balkan

Peninsula and Scandinavia, Italy and Asia Minor, Corfu and Corsica, the

Levant and Liverpool, Hungary and Scotland. But, indeed, Mr. Lang’s

objection was, in part at least, answered already, by the discovery in

Scandinavia, Orkney, and Lancashire of thousands of Cufic coins of the

ninth and tenth centuries. For where coins could journey from Bagdad,

so also of course could folk-tales.

I remember once in an English parsonage being shown a ‘cannibal fork.’

I do not think I rushed to the conclusion that the parson’s grandmother

had been a ghoul; no, I rather fancy there was talk of a son or a

brother who was a missionary somewhere, perhaps in the South Sea

Islands. And I remember also how a Suffolk vicar unearthed a

Romano-British cemetery. One of his most treasured finds was a pair of

brass compasses: ‘Marvellous,’ he would point out, ‘how like they are

to our own.’ ‘As well they may be,’ old Mrs. C—— remarked to me (she

was the daughter of a former vicar), ‘for I can quite well remember my

poor brother John losing them.’

Gypsy Originality.

Sometimes, I scarce know why, the eloquence and the ingenuity of

folklorists suggest these reminiscences; anyhow, I doubt if to

folklorists my theory is likely to commend itself. From solar myths,

savage philosophy, archæan survivals, polyonymy, relics of Druidism,

polygamous frameworks, and such-like high-sounding themes, it is a

terrible come-down to Gypsies=gipsies=tramps. [31] So I look for most

folklorists to scout my theory, and to maintain that the Turkish

Gypsies picked up their folk-tales from Turks or Greeks, the Roumanian

Gypsies theirs from Roumans, the Hungarian Gypsies theirs from Magyars,

the English and Welsh Gypsies theirs from the English and Welsh, the ——

Hold! hold! pray where are the English or Welsh originals of our Gypsy

versions of ‘The Master Thief,’ ‘The Little Peasant,’ ‘Frederick and

Catherine,’ ‘Ferdinand the Faithful,’ ‘The Master Smith,’ ‘The Robber

Bridegroom,’ or ‘Strong Hans’? where those of such English and Welsh

Gypsy stories as ‘The Black Dog of the Wild Forest,’ ‘De Little

Bull-calf,’ ‘Jack and his Golden Snuff-box,’ or ‘An Old King and his

Three Sons in England’? It may be answered that the last three are in

Mr. Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales (2 vols. 1890–94). I know those

stories are there; they form nearly ten per cent. of Mr. Jacobs’ entire

collection; but have they any business to be there? I have John

Roberts’ manuscript of ‘An Old King’ before me now; it opens—‘Adoi ses

yecker porro koreelish, ta ses les trin chavay.’ You may render that,

as I rendered it, into English, ‘There was once an old king, and he had

three sons’; but that does not make the story an English one. No; so

far as our present information goes, ‘An Old King’ is a Welsh-Gypsy

folk-tale. [32]

There is at least one other story in Mr. Jacobs’ collection that may be

Gypsy, not English. This is ‘The Three Feathers,’ which, Mrs. Gomme

tells me, was collected from some Deptford hop-pickers by a lady now in

America. Not all hop-pickers are Gypsies, but a goodly proportion are,

as I know from old walks among Kentish and Surrey hop-gardens. ‘The

Three Feathers’ is a variant of Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian story of

‘Feledico and Epomata’ (No. 55, i. 251), of an incident in Campbell’s

Gaelic story of ‘The Battle of the Birds’ (No. 2, i. 36, 50), of one in

Kennedy’s Irish story of ‘The Brown Bear of Norway’ (p. 63), and of one

in the Norse story of ‘The Master-maid.’

Gaelic and Welsh-Gypsy Stories.

Now, of ‘The Battle of the Birds’ we have a Welsh-Gypsy version, ‘The

Green Man of Noman’s Land’ (No. 62), lacking, it is true, this episode,

which may be an interpolation in the Gaelic story, but unmistakably

identical with the Gaelic story, of which, however, it forms only a

fragment. In the Gaelic version the hero is set four tasks by the

heroine’s father, in the Gypsy version five tasks, as follows:—

GAELIC. WELSH-GYPSY.

To cleanse a byre, uncleansed To clean a stable. Heroine does it.

for seven years. Heroine does Father accuses him of receiving

it. Father taxes him with having help. He denies it.

been helped.

Wanting. To fell a forest before mid-day (cf.

Polish-Gypsy story of ‘The Witch,’

p. 188). Heroine does it. Same

denial.

To thatch byre with birds’ To thatch barn with one feather only

down—birds with no two feathers of each bird. Heroine does it.

of one colour. Heroine does it.

He denies help.

To climb a very lofty fir-tree To climb glass mountain in middle of

beside a loch, and fetch down lake, and fetch egg of bird that

magpie’s five eggs. He climbs it lays one only. He wishes heroine’s

on a ladder of heroine’s shoe a boat, and they reach

fingers, but in his haste her mountain. He wishes her finger a

little finger is left on top of ladder, but steps over the last

tree. rung, and her finger is broken. She

warns him to deny help.

To select at the dance the To guess which of the three

youngest of the three sisters daughters is which, as they fly

all dressed alike. He knows her three times over castle in form of

by the absence of the little birds. Forewarned by heroine, he

finger. names them correctly.

The story, of course, is a very widespread one. We have a Sanskrit

version of it on the one hand, and on the other an African Negro

version from Jamaica, with many more referred to in the notes on two

other Gypsy versions—one from the Bukowina, ‘Made over to the Devil’

(No. 34), and the other from Galicia, ‘The Witch’ (No. 50). But in the

Gaelic and in the Gypsy version there are two special points to be

noted. The first is that the almost absolute identity of the tasks

imposed seems to preclude the idea that the likeness between the two

versions can be explained by their being derived from a common

original, three or four thousand years old. The second point is that in

some respects the Gypsy version is decidedly the better of the two: the

fir-tree beside a loch cannot compare with the glass mountain in the

middle of the lake; and the selection of the youngest daughter at the

dance is inferior to the selection of her as she flies in bird-shape

over the castle.

Other Parallels.

Resemblances only less strongly marked are observable between

Campbell’s two stories of ‘The Shifty Lad’ and ‘The Three Widows’ and

the Welsh-Gypsy story of ‘Jack the Robber’ (No. 68), between his ‘Tale

of the Soldier’ (given here as a tinker story, No. 74), and my

‘Ashypelt’ (No. 57), and between his ‘Brown Bear of the Green Glen’

(No. 73 here) and my ‘Old King his Three Sons’ (No. 55). There is also

sometimes a striking similarity of phrase and idea in Gaelic and

Welsh-Gypsy stories. Thus, in Campbell we get: ‘The dun steed would

catch the swift March wind that would be before, and the swift March

wind could not catch her’; ‘He went much further than I can tell or you

can think’; and ‘Whether dost thou like the big half of the bannock and

my curse, or the little half and my blessing?’ For which John Roberts

gives: ‘Off he went as fast as the wind, which the wind behind could

not catch the wind before’; ‘Now poor Jack goes ... further than I can

tell you to-night or ever intend to tell you’; and ‘Which would you

like best for me to make you—a little cake and to bless you, or a big

cake and to curse you?’ This last feature—of the big cake and curse, or

the little cake and blessing—is found, to the best of my knowledge, in

no folk-tale outside the British Isles; but it occurs also in the

Aberdeenshire story of ‘The Red Etin’ (Chambers’s Popular Rhymes of

Scotland, p. 90), and in Kennedy’s ‘Jack and his Comrades’ and ‘The

Corpse-Watchers’ (Fictions of the Irish Celts, pp. 5, 54).

Irish and Gypsy Folk-tales.

It is hard to conceive how stories told by Welsh Gypsies should have

been derived from West Highland folk-tales; of the alternative notion

that the West Highland folk-tales may have originally been derived from

Gypsies we get one pretty strong confirmation—the identity of

Campbell’s ‘Knight of Riddles’ (No. 22) and the Turkish-Gypsy story of

‘The Riddle’ (No. 3). Reinhold Köhler, in Orient und Occident, ii. 320,

failed to find in all Europe’s folklore any parallel to the latter, the

essential, half of the Gaelic story; but the knight’s daughter’s plaid

there is clearly the Highland version of the princess’s chemise in the

Gypsy story. Campbell, too, is sore put to it how the Rhampsinitus

story can have found its way to Dumbartonshire (i. 352), or a tale from

Boccaccio to Islay (ii. 14), or one from Straparola to Barra (ii. 238).

But all three stories are known to the Gypsies; there, then, is a

solution of Campbell’s perplexities. So that if Campbell’s stories and

the Welsh-Gypsy stories had stood alone, I should, I believe, have

urged that alternative notion. But they do not, for in several cases

the Welsh-Gypsy stories resemble Irish Gaelic versions a great deal

more closely than they do the Scottish ones. Thus, in Mr. Curtin’s

Myths and Folklore of Ireland [33] (1890) is ‘The Son of the King of

Erin and the Giant of Loch Lein,’ pp. 32–49, a variant of Campbell’s

‘Battle of the Birds’; the following brief abstract of it will show how

exactly it tallies with our ‘Green Man of Noman’s Land’ (No.

62):—Prince plays cards with giant, and wins two estates. Plays again,

and wins golden-horned cattle. Plays again, and loses his head, so has

to give himself up to giant in a year and a day. On his way to giant’s

he lodges with three old women, sisters, each of whom gives him a ball

of thread for guide. Near the giant’s castle he comes on a lake, in

which giant’s three daughters are bathing. He seizes the clothes of the

youngest one, and to get them back she promises to save him from

danger. The giant sets him tasks—to clean stable, to thatch stable with

birds’ feathers (no two alike), and to bring down crow’s one egg from a

tree covered with glass, nine hundred feet high. The youngest daughter

helps him in all three tasks, for the third task making him strip the

flesh from her bones, and use the bones as steps for climbing. Coming

down, he misses the last bone, and she loses her little toe. The prince

goes home, and is to be married to the daughter of the King of Lochlin

[Denmark], but the giant and his daughter are invited to the wedding.

Then, as in Campbell’s tale, the giant’s daughter ‘threw two grains of

wheat in the air, and there came down on the table two pigeons. The

cock pigeon pecked at the hen and pushed her off the table. Then the

hen called out to him in a human voice, “You wouldn’t do that to me the

day I cleaned the stable for you.”’ So, too, the hen reminds the cock

of the second and third tasks [34]; and, awakened at last to

remembrance, the prince weds the giant’s daughter.

Clearly, the readiest explanation of the likeness between ‘The Green

Man of Noman’s Land’ and the Scottish and Irish stories would be that

these last are both derived from Gypsies; but then of Gypsies in

Ireland our knowledge is almost nil. In a letter of 8th February 1898,

Mr. William Larminie, of Bray, Co. Wicklow, the author of West Irish

Folk-tales (1893), writes:—‘I have never heard of Irish Gypsies proper.

They seem never to have settled in the country for some reason.’ On the

other hand, three or four English-Gypsy families of my acquaintance

have certainly travelled Ireland during the last thirty years; Simson’s

History of the Gipsies (1865) contains allusions on pp. 325–8, 356–8,

etc., to visits of ‘Irish Gipsies’ to Scotland; and, according to a

note by Mr. Ffrench of Donegal in the Gypsy Lore Journal for April

1890, p. 127, ‘there are two tribes of Gypsy-folk in Ireland. The first

are real Gypsies; the second are what are called “Gilly Goolies,” and

are only touched on the Gypsies, i.e. have a strain of Gypsy blood in

their veins, and follow the mode of life followed by the Gypsies.’

Moreover, the Irish novelist, William Carleton (1794–1869), in his

Autobiography (1896), i. 212, shows that ‘Scottish gipsies’ did visit

mid-Ireland about 1814 and earlier. ‘My eldest married sister, Mary,’

he writes, ‘lived (about the period when I, having been set apart for

the Church, commenced my Latin) in the townland of a place called

Ballagh, Co. Roscommon, remarkable for the beauty of its lough. It was

during the Easter holidays, and I was on a visit to her. At that time

it was not unusual for a small encampment of the Scottish gipsies to

pass over to the north of Ireland, and indeed I am not surprised at it,

considering the extraordinary curiosity, not to say enthusiasm, with

which they were received by the people. The men were all tinkers, and

the women thieves and fortune-tellers—but in their case the thief was

always sunk in the fortune-teller.’ And he goes on to describe how he

had his own fortune told with a pack of cards by one of the women, ‘a

sallow old pythoness.’

One may not build upon so slight a superstructure, though at the same

time it should be borne in mind that nothing, absolutely nothing, was

known of the Welsh Gypsies till 1875. Where, however, as in England,

Gypsies have certainly been roaming to and fro for centuries, nothing

seems to me likelier than the transmission by them of folk-tales. For I

know by frequent journeyings with them how the Gypsy camp is the

favourite nightly rendezvous of the lads and lasses from the

neighbouring village. All the amusement they can give their guests, the

Gypsies give gladly; and stories and songs are among their best

stock-in-trade.

Gypsy Story-tellers.

Campbell of Islay has shown us a Gypsy professional story-teller in

London, and Paspati has shown us a Gypsy professional story-teller, the

grandson of one at Constantinople. That is not much, perhaps; but there

are several more indications of the transmission of folk-tales by

Gypsies. Bakht, the Rómani word for ‘luck’ or ‘fortune,’ has passed,

not merely into Albanian folk-tales, but into the Greek and Turkish

languages, as I show in a footnote on p. 53; and a good many of the

following seventy-six stories seem to show unmistakable tokens of the

practised raconteur’s art. ‘Let us leave the dogs, and return to the

girl,’ in No. 47; ‘Now we’ll leave the master to stand a bit, and go

back to the mother,’ in No. 68; ‘And I came away, told the story,’ in

Nos. 6, 7, 8, and 15; ‘And I left them there, and came and told my

story to your lordships,’ in No. 10; ‘I was there, and heard everything

that happened,’ in No. 12; ‘Away I came, the tale have told,’ in No.

18; ‘Now you’ve got it,’ in No. 28; ‘If they are not dead, they are

still alive,’ in Nos. 41 and 42, and also in Hungarian-Gypsy stories;

‘The floor there was made of paper, and I came away here,’ in No. 43;

‘So if they are not dead, they are living together,’ in No. 44; ‘Excuse

me for saying it,’ in No. 55; ‘She was delivered (pray, excuse me) of a

boy,’ in No. 46; ‘And the last time I was there I played my harp for

them, and got to go again,’ in No. 54—these all sound like tags or

formulas of the professional story-teller. Léon Zafiri’s usual wind-up,

says Paspati (p. 421), ran: ‘And I too, I was there, and I ate, and I

drank, and I have come to tell you the story.’

Story-telling a living Gypsy art.

A tree can never be quite dead as long as it puts forth shoots; I fancy

the very latest shoot in the whole Yggdrasil of European folk-tales is

the episode in ‘The Tinker and his Wife’ (No. 70), where the tinker

buys a barrel of beer, and says, ‘Now, my wench, you make the biggest

penny out of it as ever you can,’ and she goes and sells the whole

barrel to a packman for one of the old big pennies. That episode cannot

be earlier than the introduction of the new bronze coinage in 1861; it

looks as though it must itself be a recent coinage of Cornelius Price,

or of Nebuchadnēzar, his uncle. But, there, I have known a Gypsy girl

dash off what was almost a folk-tale impromptu. She had been to a

pic-nic in a four-in-hand, with ‘a lot o’ real tip-top gentry’; and

‘Reía,’ she said to me afterwards, ‘I’ll tell you the comicalest thing

as ever was. We’d pulled up, to put the brake on; and there was a púro

hotchiwítchi (old hedgehog) come and looked at us through the hedge,

looked at me hard. I could see he’d his eye upon me. And home he’d go,

that old hedgehog, to his wife, and “Missus,” he’d say, “what d’ ye

think? I seen a little Gypsy gal just now in a coach and four hosses”;

and “Dábla!” she’d say, “sawkúmni ’as vardé kenáw”’ (Bless us! every

one now keeps a carriage).

Possible Gypsy influences.

I have told English Gypsies Grimm’s tale of ‘The Hare and the

Hedgehog,’ and they always pronounce that it must be a Rómani story

(‘Who else would have gone for to make up a tale about hedgehogs?’)

[35] But the question whether in many non-Gypsy collections there are

not a number of folk-tales that present strong internal evidence of

their Gypsy origin is a difficult question; it would take us too far

afield, and could lead to no really definite results. Still, I must say

a word or two. In Hahn’s fine variant (ii. 267) of our ‘Mare’s Son’

from the island of Syra a vizier travels from town to town, seeking a

lad as handsome as the prince. At last he is passing through a Gypsy

quarter, [36] when he hears a boy singing: ‘his voice was beautiful as

any nightingale’s.’ He looks through a door, and sees a boy, who is

every whit as handsome as the prince, so he purchases this boy, and the

boy plays a leading part in the story. The abject contempt in which

Gypsies are held throughout the whole of south-eastern Europe renders

it probable that none but a Gypsy would thus have described a member of

the race. The story, too, from its opening clause, a greeting to the

‘goodly company,’ would seem to have been told by a professional

story-teller—a kinsman, possibly, of Léon Zafiri. Krauss’s Croatian

story (No. 98) of ‘The Gypsy and the Nine Franciscans’ is just ‘Les

Trois Bossus’ of the trouvère Durant (Liebrecht’s Dunlop, p. 209); yet

it has, to my thinking, a thoroughly Rómani ring. In Campbell’s Gaelic

story of ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’ (No. 1) the hero’s young

wife is carried off by a giant, and, following their track, he comes

thrice on the site of a fire. If I were telling that story to Gypsies,

I should say, not site of a fire, but fireplace: I fancy I can hear the

Gypsies’ exclamations—‘Dere! my blessed! following de fireplaces.

Course he’d know den which way de giant had gone.’ I could cite a good

score of similar instances; but I will content myself with this

footnote from Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (ed. 1873, iv.

102):—‘Besides the prophetic powers ascribed to the Gypsies in most

European countries, the Scottish peasants believe them possessed of the

power of throwing upon bystanders a spell, and causing them to see the

thing that is not.... The receipt to prevent the operation of these

deceptions was to use a sprig of four-leaved clover. I remember to have

heard (certainly very long ago, for at that time I believed the

legend), that a Gypsy exercised his glamour over a number of persons at

Haddington, to whom he exhibited a common dunghill cock, trailing what

appeared to the spectators a massy oaken trunk. An old man passed with

a cart of clover; he stopped, and picked out a four-leaved blade; the

eyes of the spectators were opened,—and the oaken trunk appeared to be

a bulrush.’ But that is just Grimm’s No. 149, ‘The Beam’: what

folklorist has ever associated ‘The Beam’ with the Gypsies?

Theory.

To recapitulate, my theory, then, is this:—The Gypsies quitted India at

an unknown date, probably taking with them some scores of Indian

folk-tales, as they certainly took with them many hundreds of Indian

words. By way of Persia and Armenia, they arrived in the Greek-speaking

Balkan Peninsula, and tarried there for several centuries, probably

disseminating their Indian folk-tales, and themselves picking up Greek

folk-tales, as they certainly gave Greek the Rómani word bakht,

‘fortune,’ and borrowed from it paramísi, ‘story,’ and about a hundred

more terms. From the Balkan Peninsula they have spread since 1417, or

possibly earlier, to Siberia, Norway, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Brazil,

and the countries between, everywhere probably disseminating the

folk-tales they started with and those they picked up by the way, and

everywhere probably adding to their store. Thus, I take it, they picked

up the complete Rhampsinitus story in the Balkan Peninsula, and carried

it thence to Roumania and Scotland; in Scotland, if John MacDonald was

any sort of a Gypsy, they seem to have picked up ‘Osean after the

Feen.’

It is not so smooth and rounded a theory as I hoped to be able to

present to folklorists, or as I might easily have made it by

suppressing a little here and filling out somewhat there. But at least

I have pointed out a few fresh parallels; I have, thanks to Mr.

Sampson’s generosity, enriched our stock, not of English folk-tales,

but of folk-tales collected in England and Wales; [37] and I have, I

hope, stimulated a measure of curiosity in the strange, likeable,

uncanny race, whom ‘Hans Breitmann’ has happily designated ‘the

Colporteurs of Folklore.’ I let my little theory go reluctantly, but

invite the fullest argument and discussion. There is nothing like

argument. I was once at a meeting of a Learned Society, where a friend

of mine read a most admirable paper. Then uprose another member of that

Learned Society, and challenged his every contention. In a rich,

sonorous voice he thus began: ‘Max Müller has said (and I agree with

Max Müller), that Sanskrit in dying left twins—Chinese and Semitic.’

GYPSY FOLK-TALES

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Title: Gypsy folk-tales

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Original publication: United Kingdom: Hurst and Blackett, 1899

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GYPSY FOLK-TALES ***

GYPSY FOLK-TALES

BY

FRANCIS HINDES GROOME

AUTHOR OF ‘IN GYPSY TENTS’

‘TWO SUFFOLK FRIENDS’

‘KRIEGSPIEL,’ ETC.

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