The ocean of story, being C.H. Tawney's translation of Somadeva's ...

xiv THE OCEAN OF STORY
associated Indian forms which happen to be known to me
are not exact parallels. Prince Rasalu mischievously de-
stroyed the water-pots of the women in his father's capital,
but his exile resulted not from their curse, but from the king's
indignant sentence.1 In Somadeva the prince, when playing
at ball, accidentally strikes a female ascetic.2
A different introductory motif, which again seems to me
to be too distinctive to have been invented more than once,
is connected with the dangers of incautiously mentioning the
name of a magical personage or of indulging in ill-considered
imprecation, which has a way of being literally
and most un-
pleasantly fulfilled. These dangers are, of course, universally
recognised, 3 but I cannot believe that it is at all probable
that the following particular derivative of this general superstition
originated independently among a number of different
peoples.
As the result of an ejaculation of despondency (or
very much less frequently of joy) a magical being (jinn,
" Arab," vel sim.) unexpectedly appears and declares :
" You
called ' Oh !
'
name." This incident
which often serves as introduction to variants of Grimm,
No. 68, De Gaudeif un sien Meester, but occurs also in other
{vel sim.). That is my
contexts, is frequent in the Near and Middle East and is
found in Sicily and Italy.
In Northern and Western Europe
it cannot be equally popular, and I do not think that it
occurs. 4
Cosquin claimed that he had proved
its Indian
origin, though, in fact, he cites no example from further east
than the Caucasus region an instance of how loose his argument
too often becomes ! I do not recall any Indian analogue,
but until Professor Bloomfield's promised Encyclopedia
of Hindu Fiction 5 becomes an accomplished fact the
student of Western stories has no ready work of reference by
which to check his limited and superficial knowledge of the
content of Eastern stories.
1
Swynnerton, Romantic Tales from the Punjab, pp. 53-54.
2 See Vol. Ill, p. 259; Vol. V, p. 171.
3 Some examples will be found in Folk-Lore, xxi, p. 154.
4 Bolte and Polivka, op. cit., ii, p. 63, to which add the references given
in Dawkins, op. cit., p. 228, and Cosquin, Etudes Folkloriques, pp. 532-542.
5 See Foreword to Vol. VII.