the mythical region of the Sun in both tales is signaled by dinnertime. She dines
in the company of the old woman with the furs; he feasts on the bounty provided
by the magic piece of hide.
In the woman’s version, a widow, lacking a benevolent male in her life, seeks
advice from a magical male figure. The old woman meets and corrects girls and
women before leaving the village. She moves into mythical territory after she
crosses the river, and engages in conversations with the river and the rock. When
the women take the advice that she brings them, to become good housekeepers
and almsgivers, they are in fact embracing two traits that are highly valued in
other tales of the same narrator.
In the male version, however, there is no clear divide between domestic and
magical territory, although the association of women with the home and men with
public space is evident in the ordering of the supplicants he meets. He encounters
the slovenly girls first (closest to his home territory), the buried man second (on
the road), and the rock last (far from the village). Lacking a wife at home, he
seeks advice from a female figure, the Sun’s Mother, and she provides him with a
magic device that produces cooked food for him.
Cinderella Maritsa
(AT 510A & AT 780; Eberhard-Boratav 60 & 241; El-Shamy 510 & 780.)46
“Cinderella” is of course well known virtually across the world.47 There are at
least four published versions of this story from Pontos: from Trebizond in 1885,
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59
Stavrin in 1937, Imera in 1938, and Kotyora in 1939.48 The tales from Trebizond
and Imera come from one subtype, those from Stavrin and Kotyora from another.
Like other Greek versions,49 the Pontic oikotype opens with cannibalism, but
since they do not include famine as its excuse, the deed is all the more repugnant.
Of the two examined below, one was collected from a male narrator in or near
the city of Trebizond in Ottoman Turkey around 1885, the other from a female
narrator in Greece before 1935.
As in other Greek versions of the tale, here too the primary relationship is
among women of a household, and different episodes of conflict are shown
between women in the same family. Men play a decidedly minor role. The female
version of the story begins with a widower with two wicked daughters. He marries
a good woman, with whom he has a beautiful little girl. After he dies, no one can
control the older girls. In the male version there is no father at all, only an old
woman with two wicked daughters and one good daughter. The older girls hate
the youngest because their mother loves her best.
In the female version, the two sisters force their stepmother to do all the
housework. To make ends meet she spins the wool of strangers for pay. One day
the evil sisters load her distaff with poor quality wool and their own with good
wool, and propose a spinning contest. The rules are simple: the one whose thread
breaks first will be eaten by the others. They let her first break pass; the second
they ignore; after the third, they kill her. Maritsa wakes to find her mother’s bones
scattered. In the male version the scene is much the same, except that the mother
is not working for strangers.
In the female version, Cinderella hides her mother’s bones and spinning
equipment and censes them every day; she becomes the sisters’ servant. In
the male version, the sisters only spare Cinderella’s life so that she can do the
housework. She hides the bones and weeps over them every day for forty days.
A great dance is announced in both versions of the tale. In the female version,
the king intends to choose a bride for his son. The sisters dress up and go;
Cinderella dresses in clothes and shoes she finds near her mother’s bones and
goes to the dance, where everyone is amazed by her beauty. She dazzles the king’s
son. Trying to return home ahead of her sisters, she loses a shoe in a stream.
The next day, the king’s horses refuse to drink from the stream for fear of the
shoe, which is found and recognized by the prince. He takes the shoe around, and
discovers Cinderella.
In the female version, the sisters persuade the king to let them come to the
palace as bridesmaids. In the male version, they are allowed to come because
Cinderella takes pity on them. In both versions, when she is brought to childbed,
they act as her midwives. Every year, when she bears a baby, they substitute a
puppy, a kitten, or a snake for it. The king finally loses patience and has Cinderella
locked up—in the female version in the garbage heap (where a servant secretly
brings her food), in the male version, in a small room.
In the female version, the king marries one of the sisters. Three cypresses grow
from the graves of the babies. When the king passes by, the cypresses bow. His
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new wife orders them cut down to make a bed. In the evenings the wood of the bed
speaks and says: “Did you ever see a father kiss his wife in front of his children?”
She has the bed chopped up, a widow burns the pieces of wood and throws the
ashes into her cabbages. A goat eats one and gives birth to three beautiful little
boys. In the male version, three flowers grow over the boys’ graves; a cow eats
the flowers, and nine months later she gives birth to three little boys, each wearing
a string of pearls.
In both versions, the king is so mystified by these events that he searches for
someone to explain them. Cinderella is finally allowed to tell her story and claim
her children. The sisters are killed. In the male version, Cinderella and the king
celebrate with another wedding; in the female version, he gives her so many
servants that she never has to rise from bed again.
The female version from Imera lays greater emphasis than other Pontic versions
on the fact that the mother and Maritsa were outsiders within the family, and on
the usurpation of their rightful roles by the stepsisters. After becoming widowed,
the mother must work as a maid in other people’s houses, a humiliating situation
faced by many Pontic refugee women in Greece. Only the female narrator includes
a physical description of Maritsa after her exile to the garbage heap, describing
her as having long hair growing on her face, a sign of starvation. The motif of
jealous sisters substituting young animals for the heroine’s newborn babies (and
the king’s rejection of her because of it) also appears in a Persian tale.50
The female narrator pays careful attention to the nuances in the relationships
among the women and to the details of how the stepsisters bring off their plot.
The mother has to take in wool to spin and begs the stepdaughters to help; they
react by rigging a spinning contest against her. Angelopoulou argues that spinning
was an activity that defined whether or not a girl was competent to get married
and have children.51 The ability to spin seems to have been equated with feminine
power. Although the evil sisters in the story lay claim to this power, they have to
cheat to secure it. The mother can be killed because she no longer appears to spin
> as well as her daughters—just as the two sisters interrupt Cinderella’s feminine
power when they steal her newborns so that her ability to bear children is in doub
and she is cast aside.
The Cinderella in the male Trebizond tale is too full of good will towards her
sisters to recognize the danger they pose. It is characteristic of the female tales
from Imera, however, that Cinderella recognizes the danger from her sisters, but,
having used silence as an armor throughout the story, she is unable or unwilling to
tell anyone about it. Though her tongue may be fettered, her mind is not. When the
two sisters curse about the beautiful girl at the ball, Cinderella thinks to herself:
“If you only knew who I was.” The female narrator has her heroine act as society
dictates, but retain her private, internal life.
Giannits and Maritsa (Little Brother and Little Sister)
(AT 1373B & AT 450 & AT 403; Eberhard-Boratav 168; El-Shamy 450.)52 This
tale was well known in the Greek world, and was collected in Thrace, Epeiros,
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61
Asia Minor, and the islands. It was also known throughout Europe, Turkey, and
the Arab world. The two Pontic versions below were both collected in Greece.
The villages from which they come, Santa and Imera, were near each other in
Turkey.
The story begins with two parents deciding to kill their children—in the female
version from Imera because they discover that human flesh is delicious, and in the
male version from Santa because they resent taking care of them: “Perhaps we
will live until they grow up but after they grow up God knows if they will look
after us. Let us kill them and be rid of them and we will be free.”
A bird warns the children of the danger. In the female version they escape into
the forest; in the male they take magic flight from their pursuing parents—that is,
they throw small objects behind them that magically become immense obstacles
for their pursuers.
Once safe from their parents, the children become desperately thirsty. The
girl prevents the boy from drinking out of animal tracks for fear that he will be
transformed into that animal. When she falls asleep, he drinks from a deer track
and becomes a fawn. He uses his antlers to place his sister onto the branches of
a gigantic tree. In the female version, the sight of her braids scares the king’s
horses that wished to drink from the river; in the male version, her reflection in
the water does. When the servants cannot understand what is scaring the horses,
the king himself discovers the girl in the tree. The tree is so enormous that the
king’s men cannot cut it down in one day; every night the fawn repairs the cut. In
both versions, the king summons a witch to lure the girl down. The witch tricks
the girl down by kneading bread incorrectly, and pretending to be deaf so that the
girl has to climb down to correct her. The witch seizes her by the hair and takes
her to the king.
In the female version, the king waits until the girl grows up in order to marry
her to his son; in the male version, the king immediately falls in love with her and
marries her himself. Shortly after the wedding, in the female version, the witch
is envious and poisons the new bride with salt, forces her to trade her eyes for a
drink, then abandons her in the wilderness and substitutes her own ugly daughter
for her at the palace. The blinded girl gains magic powers: when the witch plots
to kill the fawn, the girl causes the knives to lose their edge and the cauldrons to
empty out. In place of tears, she weeps flowers. A shepherd rescues her and trades
her flowers to the witch for her eyes. The king learns where the flowers came from
and unmasks his fraudulent wife. In the male version, the spiteful witch leads the
girl to the lake and pushes her in. She is rescued when the fawn throws her bread.
Both the witch and her daughter are tied to horses’ tails in the female version; only
the witch is punished in the male. The female tale only ends when Maritsa returns
to the palace and rewards the shepherd.
The female version is more attentive to the motivation of the characters and
to certain “feminine” details. The girl has “braids,” not “hair.” The king holds
off marrying her until she is of age, a detail missing from the male version. The
priest and his wife (the children’s parents at the beginning of the female tale)
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are motivated by gluttony, the fawn by thirst and love for his sister, the witch
by jealousy. The motif of the substituted bride, common in “female” tales, is
present here but missing in the male version. The male version also lacks a reason
for the witch to push the girl into the lake. In the female version the girl works
towards her own good: she tries to stop her brother from becoming an animal,
uses magic to prevent him from being killed, and persuades a shepherd to help
get her eyes back. In the male version, while she also tries to prevent her brother’s
transformation, she is otherwise a pawn of the king and the witch.
The Twelve Months
(AT 480.)53 A story about a poor woman and her malicious sister-in-law, “The
Twelve Months” is a subtype of the tale Warren Roberts analyzed in The Kind and
Unkind Girls,54 found worldwide in a variety of forms. From Roberts’ paradigm
of the “Strawberries in the Snow subtype, Twelve Months form” we can further
subdivide the Greek tales into the “Baking subform” and the “Spinning subform.”
The tales below are examples of the “Spinning subform”: both women are
childless; a rich sister-in-law refuses to let a poor sister-in-law spin wool by her
lamp, so the poor sister-in-law is forced out onto the mountain in search of a light;
she finds the twelve months sitting around a fire. In each subtype, the rich woman
is malicious, the poor one is gracious and enterprising.
Dawkins collected a version of the “Baking subform” from Sourmena and a
version of the “Spinning subform” from Haralampos Fotiades in Imera, the latter
of which is presented below.55 The female version of the tale is from Stavrin,
published by D.K. Papadopoulos who collected it in Greece.
The male version of the tale begins with two sisters-in-law, “one rich but evil,
the other poor but good.” The female version from Stavrin provides a background
story: a hardworking elderly couple has two sons. When the wife dies suddenly,
the family suffers greatly, and the old man marries his older son to a local girl
from a good family. She is lazy and foul-tempered, so that the father finally builds
the newlyweds their own house, and the son flees abroad to find work. The father
marries his younger son to a girl from a different village; she is industrious, good
natured, and quiet. Although everyone else in the village comes to love her, her
sister-in-law is jealous. After the new bride’s husband and father-in-law suddenly
die and she is unable to return to her own parents, she is forced to take in wool for
spinning to eke out a living. In the female version the woman narrator goes into
some detail about her attending evening work parties because s
he cannot afford a
light of her own to spin by. She stops going, however, because she cannot afford
to reciprocate; her sister-in-law finally bars her from her work parties, so she goes
to spin in the light outside the sister-in-law’s window.
In both versions the sister-in-law drives her away from the window. She sees a
distant light on the mountainside, where she finds twelve young men sitting around
a fire. In the male version, she is immediately invited to sit by the fire. When they
ask her opinion of the months, she speaks well of each of them. In the female
version, she is too shy to approach the twelve months, and sits far from the fire to
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63
spin. When she becomes clumsy from the cold, they invite her to approach. She
spins her wool quickly and well, as she tells of her troubles; in singing her final
lament for her husband, she praises the months. The twelve months fill her apron
with live embers. In both versions she obeys their instructions and the embers turn
into gold; in the female version she then provisions her house in a wise and thrifty
manner so that she can work and live well for the rest of her days.
In the male version, the sister-in-law learns of her success and decides to
imitate her. In the female version, the sister-in-law’s slovenly habits have brought
her to hard times, and her husband never sends her any money. In both versions,
the good sister-in-law tells her how the months helped her. In the male version
the wicked sister-in-law finds the months around the fire and curses the seasons
in turn. In the female version, she finds the months, sits at their fire without being
invited, spins her wool very badly, in thick uneven clumps, blurts out her sorrows
without being asked, and curses two of the months. In both versions she takes the
embers they give her and pours them into the hearth; by the next morning, they
have turned into snakes that destroy her. The male version ends with a moral:
“Thus suffer the evil ones who do not wish for the good of others.” The female
version only notes that the good sister-in-law lived even better than ever.
Some of the differences between the two tales—especially Fotiades’ rather
bare-bones approach and the more lush recounting of Papadopoulos’ narrator—
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