Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite...

The Adventures of a prince, the youngest of three brothers, who has been lowered into the underground world or who has ascended into an enchanted upper realm, form the theme of numerous skazkas, several of which are variants of the story of Norka. The prince’s elder brothers almost always attempt to kill him, when he is about to ascend from the gulf or descend from the steeps which separate him from them. In one instance, the following excuse is offered for their conduct. The hero has killed a Snake in the underground world, and is carrying its head on a lance, when his brothers begin to hoist him up. “His brothers were frightened at the sight of that head and thinking the Snake itself was coming, they let Ivan fall back into the pit.”[90] But this apology for their behavior seems to be due to the story-teller’s imagination. In some instances their unfraternal conduct may be explained in the following manner. In oriental tales the hero is often the son of a king’s youngest wife, and he is not unnaturally hated by his half-brothers, the sons of an older queen, whom the hero’s mother has supplanted in their royal father’s affections. Accordingly they do their best to get rid of him.

Thus, in one of the Indian stories which correspond to that of Norka, the hero’s success at court “excited the envy and jealousy of his brothers [doubtless half-brothers], and they were not satisfied until they had devised a plan to effect his removal, and, as they hoped, accomplish his destruction.”[91] We know also that “Israel loved Joseph more than all his children,” because he was the son “of his old age,” and the result was that “when his brethren [who were only his half-brothers] saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him.”[92] When such tales as these came west in Christian times, their references to polygamy were constantly suppressed, and their distinctions between brothers and half-brothers disappeared. In the same way the elder and jealous wife, who had behaved with cruelty in the original stories to the offspring of her rival, often became turned, under Christian influences, into a stepmother who hated her husband’s children by a previous marriage.

There may, however, be a mythological explanation of the behavior of the two elder brothers. Professor de Gubernatis is of opinion that “in the Vedic hymns, Tritas, the third brother, and the ablest as well as best, is persecuted by his brothers,” who, “in a fit of jealousy, on account of his wife, the aurora, and the riches she brings with her from the realm of darkness, the cistern or well [into which he has been lowered], detain their brother in the well,”[93] and he compares this form of the myth with that which it assumes in the following Hindoo tradition. “Three brothers, Ekata (i.e. the first), Dwita (i.e. the second) and Trita (i.e. the third) were travelling in a desert, and being distressed with thirst, came to a well, from which the youngest, Trita, drew water and gave it to his brothers; in requital, they drew him into the well, in order to appropriate his property and having covered the top with a cart-wheel, left him in the well. In this extremity he prayed to the gods to extricate him, and by their favor he made his escape.”[94] This myth may, perhaps, be the germ from which have sprung the numerous folk-tales about the desertion of a younger brother in some pit or chasm, into which his brothers have lowered him.[95]

It may seem more difficult to account for the willingness of Norka’s three sisters to aid in his destruction—unless, indeed, the whole story be considered to be mythological, as its Indian equivalents undoubtedly are. But in many versions of the same tale the difficulty does not arise. The princesses of the copper, silver, and golden realms, are usually represented as united by no ties of consanguinity with the snake or other monster whom the hero comes to kill. In the story of “Usuinya,”[96] for instance, there appears to be no relationship between these fair maidens and the “Usuinya-Bird,” which steals the golden apples from a monarch’s garden and is killed by his youngest son Ivan. That monster is not so much a bird as a flying dragon. “This Usuinya-bird is a twelve-headed snake,” says one of the fair maidens. And presently it arrives—its wings stretching afar, while along the ground trail its moustaches [usui, whence its name]. In a variant of the same story in another collection,[97] the part of Norka is played by a white wolf. In that of Ivan Suchenko[98] it is divided among three snakes who have stolen as many princesses. For the snake is much given to abduction, especially when he appears under the terrible form of “Koshchei, the Deathless.”

Koshchei is merely one of the many incarnations of the dark spirit which takes so many monstrous shapes in the folk-tales of the class with which we are now dealing. Sometimes he is described as altogether serpent-like in form; sometimes he seems to be of a mixed nature, partly human and partly ophidian, but in some of the stories he is apparently framed after the fashion of a man. His name is by some mythologists derived from kost’, a bone whence comes a verb signifying to become ossified, petrified, or frozen; either because he is bony of limb, or because he produces an effect akin to freezing or petrifaction.[99]

He is called “Immortal” or “The Deathless,”[100] because of his superiority to the ordinary laws of existence. Sometimes, like Baldur, he cannot be killed except by one substance; sometimes his “death”—that is, the object with which his life is indissolubly connected—does not exist within his body. Like the vital centre of “the giant who had no heart in his body” in the well-known Norse tale, it is something extraneous to the being whom it affects, and until it is destroyed he may set all ordinary means of annihilation at defiance. But this is not always the case, as may be learnt from one of the best of the skazkas in which he plays a leading part, the history of—