Filipino Popular Tales. Various

The king turns loose in the city a gold-adorned animal, and orders the arrest of any person seen capturing it. The thief steals it as in D¹, or is observed and his house-door marked. Then as in E⁶. (E⁵) Old woman begging for “hind’s flesh” or “camel-grease” finds his house; but the thief suspects her and kills her; or (E⁶) she gets away, after marking the house-door so that it may be recognized again. But the thief sees the mark, and proceeds to mark similarly all the other doors in the street. (E⁷) The king puts a prohibitive price on meat, thinking that only the thief will be able to buy; but the thief steals a joint.

      However many the changes and additions of this sort (king’s move followed by thief’s move) rung in, almost all of the stories dealing with the robbery of the king’s treasury end with the pardon of the thief and his exaltation to high rank in the royal household. In none of the score of versions of the “Rhampsinitus” story cited by Clouston is the thief subjected to any further tests of his prowess after he has been pardoned by the king. We shall return to this point.

      The “Master Thief” cycle has much less to do with our stories than has the “Rhampsinitus” cycle: hence we shall merely enumerate the incidents to be found in it. (For bibliography of stories containing these situations, see Cosquin.)

      1 A Hero, the youngest of three brothers, becomes a thief. For various reasons (the motives are different in Grimm 192, and Dasent xxxv) he displays his skill:—

      2 B¹ Theft of the purse (conducted as a droll: the young apprentice-thief, noodle-like, brings back purse to robber-gang after throwing away the money).

      3 B² Theft of cattle being driven to the fair. This trick is usually conducted in one of four ways: (a) two shoes in road; (b) hanging self; (c) bawling in the wood like a strayed ox; (d) exciting peasant’s curiosity—“comedy of comedies,” “wonder of wonders.”

      4 B³ Theft of the horse. This is usually accomplished by the disguised thief making the grooms drunk.

      5 B⁴ Stealing of a live person and carrying him in a sack to the one who gave the order. (The thief disguises himself as an angel, and promises to conduct his victim to heaven.)

      Other instances of the “Master Thief’s” cleverness, not found in Cosquin, are—

      1 B⁵ Stealing sheet or coverlet from sleeping person (Grimm, Dasent).

      2 B⁶ Stealing roast from spit while whole family is guarding it (Dasent).

      We may now examine the members of the “Rhampsinitus” group that contain situations clearly belonging to the “Master Thief” formula. These are as follows:—

      1 Groome, No. II, “The Two Thieves,” B² (d), B⁴.

      2 F. Liebrecht in a Cyprus story (Jahrb. f. rom. und eng. lit., 13 : 367–374 = Legrand, Contes grecs, p. 205), “The Master Thief,” B²(a, c, d).

      3 Wardrop, No. XIV, “The Two Thieves,” B⁴.

      4 Radloff, in a Tartar story (IV, p. 193), B⁴.

      5 Prym and Socin, in a Syriac story (II, No. 42), B⁴.

      It seems very likely that the Georgian, Tartar, and Syriac stories are nearly related to one another. The Roumanian gypsy tale, too, it will be noted, adds to the “Rhampsinitus” formula the incident of the theft of a person in a sack. This latter story, again, is connected with the Georgian tale, in that the opening is identical in both. One thief meets another, and challenges him to steal the eggs (feathers) from a bird without disturbing it. While he is doing so, he is in turn robbed unawares of his drawers by the first thief. (Compare Grimm, No. 129; a Kashmir story in Knowles, 110–112; and a Kabylie story, Rivière, 13.)

      The number of tales combining the two cycles of the “Master Thief” and “Rhampsinitus’s Treasure-House” is so small compared with the number of “pure” versions of each cycle, that we are led to think it very unlikely that there ever was a “lost original.” There seems to be no evidence whatsoever that these two cycles had a common ancestor. Besides the fact that the number of stories in which the contamination is found is relatively very small, there is also to be considered the fact that these few examples are recent. No one is known to have existed more than seventy-five years ago. Hence the “snowball” theory will better explain the composite nature of the gypsy version and our story of “Zaragoza” than a “missing-link” theory. These two cycles, consisting as they do of a series of tests of skill, are peculiarly fitted to be interlocked. The wonder is, not that they have become combined in a few cases, but that they have remained separate in so many more, particularly as both stories are very widespread; and, given the ingredients, this is a combination that could have been made independently by many story-tellers. Could not the idea occur to more than one narrator that it is a greater feat to steal a living person (B⁴) than a corpse (D¹), a piece of roast meat guarded by a person who knows that the thief is coming (B⁶) than a piece of raw meat from an unsuspecting butcher (E⁷)? All in all, it appears to me much more likely that the droll and certainly later cycle of the “Master Thief” grew out of the more serious and earlier cycle of “Rhampsinitus’s Treasure-House” (by the same process as is suggested in the notes to No. 1 of this present collection) than that the two are branches from the same trunk.

      In any case, our two stories make the combination. When or whence these Tagalog versions arose I cannot say. Nor need they be analyzed in detail, as the texts are before us in full. I will merely call attention to the fact that in “Zaragoza” the king sets a snare (cf. Herodotus) for the thief, instead of the more common barrel of pitch. There is something decidedly primitive about this trap which shoots arrows into its victim. Zaragoza’s trick whereby he fools the rich merchant has an analogue in Knowles’s Kashmir story of “The Day-Thief and the Night-Thief” (p. 298).

      “Juan the Peerless Robber,” garbled and unsatisfactory as it is in detail and perverted in dénouement, presents the interesting combination of the skill-contest between the two thieves (see above), the treachery of one (cf. the Persian Bahar-i-Danush, 2 : 225–248), and the stealing of the abbot in a sack.

1 Why peso, I cannot say. A hole the size of a peso would accommodate a rope, but hardly a man or a large tub. The story is clearly imperfect in many respects.

      The Seven Crazy Fellows.

       Table of Contents

      Narrated by Cipriano Seráfica, from Mangaldan. Pangasinan.

      Once there were living in the country in the northern part of Luzon seven crazy fellows, named Juan, Felipe, Mateo, Pedro, Francisco, Eulalio, and Jacinto. They were happy all the day long.

      One morning Felipe asked his friends to go fishing. They staid at the Cagayan River a long time. About two o’clock in the afternoon Mateo said to his companions, “We are hungry; let us go home!”

      “Before we go,” said Juan, “let us count ourselves, to see that we are all here!” He counted; but because he forgot to count himself, he found that they were only six, and said that one of them had been drowned. Thereupon they all dived into the river to look for their lost companion; and when they came out, Francisco counted to see if he had been found; but he, too, left himself out, so in they dived again. Jacinto said that they should not go home until they had found the one who was lost. While they were diving, an old man passed by. He asked the fools what they were diving for. They said that one of them had been drowned.

      “How many were you at first?” said the old man.

      They said that they were seven.

      “All right,” said the old man. “Dive in, and I will count you.” They dived, and he found that they were seven. Since he had found their lost companion, he asked them to come with him.

      When they reached