101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition by Ulrich Marzolph

Author:Ulrich Marzolph [Marzolph, Ulrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT022000 Literary Criticism / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology, LIT004220 Literary Criticism / Middle Eastern, HUM004000 Humor / Form / Jokes & Riddles
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Having realized that women will always find a way to deceive their husbands, the travelers return home and continue their life as usual.

The tale’s editor mentions a similar early twentieth-century version from Siberian Russian tradition that also involves the motifs of the beauty contest and the travelers’ marriage to a single woman, without giving further details.4 A total of three Hungarian versions of the tale were recorded from the oral tradition of the Székely population in Romania.5 A nineteenth-century version was told by Balácz Orbán, who spent fourteen years of his life in Constantinople.6 This version was classified as Hungarian tale type 977*7 that corresponds to the international tale type ATU 1426: The Wife Kept in a Box. The tale starts with the queen marveling at the beautiful portrait of a young man, disbelieving that any man could possibly be so handsome. When the young man is brought to her presence, his good looks have vanished since he witnessed his wife having sex with “a beardless and puny guy” just after he left her and only returned to pick up the prayer book he had forgotten. The young man’s good looks are reestablished when he witnesses the queen’s unfaithfulness. Traveling around together with the king, the two men meet a peasant who carries a heavy trunk on his back while working in the fields. Although the peasant’s wife claims that the trunk contains her valuables, in reality it conceals her lover. The second Székely version was recorded before 1941 by János Ösz from the oral performance of György Bukló, a farmhand from Kibéd. Here, the king invites the handsome young man to court. When the man returns home to pick up the letter of invitation he forgot to take along, he finds his wife making love to “an ugly black Gypsy coachman.” Later witnessing the queen making love to “an ugly black gardener,” the man gets well again. Roaming the world together with the king, they meet a peasant who carries his wife’s lover in a trunk on his back. The third Székely version was recorded by Linda Dégh from day laborer György Andrásfalvi from Kakasd in 1948.8 Although the collector analyzed traits of the aging narrator’s forgetfulness9 and his “clear adherence to reading matter,”10 the tale corresponds more or less to the two other Székely versions. A special detail is the fact that the handsome man’s loss of beauty becomes apparent right after he witnesses his wife’s relation with a black servant, so that the king’s chamberlain who comes to take him to the king already wonders what might have happened.

The above tales from Eastern European oral tradition overlap in the initial episode of the beauty contest, the two scenes of extramarital sexual relations and their respective consequences, and the two men setting out to learn whether women anywhere in the world are faithful to their men. All of the Székely tales mention the peasant carrying his wife’s lover in a trunk on his back. This part of the tale corresponds to tale type ATU 1358B: Husband Carries Off Box Containing Hidden Lover.

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