Cyclops Folktales

XIII.—Ulysses and Polyphemus (from Apollodorus, The Library vol. II. English translation by J.G. Frazer, edited by J. Henderson, first published 1921) (1) The oldest of the modern versions of the Polyphemus story occurs in a mediaeval collection of tales which was written in or soon after 1184 a.d. by a monk, John, of the Cistercian Abbey of Haute-Seille (Alta Silva) in Lorraine. The book, dedicated to Bertrand, Bishop of Metz, is composed in very fair Latin and bears the title of Dolopathos sive de Rege et Septem Sapientibus. It was lost for centuries, but in 1864 a manuscript copy of the work was discovered by A. Mussafia in the Royal Library at Vienna. Subsequent research brought to light several other manuscripts at Vienna, Innsbruck, and Luxemburg, and in 1873 a complete edition of the book was published by H. Oesterley at Strasbourg. Meantime the work had long been known to scholars through a metrical French translation which was written somewhere between the years 1222 and 1226 a.d. by a certain trouvère named Herbers. Considerable extracts from the poem, amounting to about a third of the whole, were published, with a prose analysis, by Le Roux de Lincy in 1838; but the complete poem was first edited, from two manuscripts in the Imperial (now the National) Library in Paris, by Charles Brunet and Anatole de Montaiglon in 1856. This mediaeval collection of stories, called Dolopathos, whether in its original Latin form or in the metrical French translation, is clearly based, directly or indirectly, on an older mediaeval collection of tales called The Book of Sindibad or The Seven Sages, of which versions exist in many languages, both Oriental and European; for not only is the general framework or plan of Dolopathos the same with that of Sindibad or The Seven Sages, but out of the eight stories which it contains, three are identical with those included in the earlier work. Among the tales which the two collections have in common the story of Polyphemus is not one, for it appears only in Dolopathos. As told by the author of Dolopathos the story of Polyphemus diverges in certain remarkable features from the Homeric account, and since some of these divergences occur in popular versions of the story recorded among various peoples, we may reasonably infer that John de Haute-Seille herein followed oral tradition rather than the Homeric version of the tale. At the same time he certainly appears to have been acquainted with the Odyssey; for he not only mentions Polyphemus by name but speaks of Circe, daughter of the Sun, and how she transformed the companions of Ulysses into diverse beasts. The story of Polyphemus, as recorded in Dolopathos, runs as follows:— (1)A famous robber, who had lived to old age and accumulated vast riches in the exercise of his profession, resolved to devote the remainder of his days to the practice of virtue, and in pursuance of that laudable resolution he excited by his exemplary conduct the wonder and admiration of all who remembered the crimes and atrocities of his earlier life. Being invited by the queen to recount the greatest perils and adventures which he had met with in his career of brigandage, he spoke thus: “Once on a time we heard that a giant, who owned great sums of gold and silver, dwelt in a solitary place about twenty miles distant from the abodes of men. Lured by the thirst for gold, a hundred of us robbers assembled together and proceeded with much ado to his dwelling. Arrived there, we had the pleasure of finding him not at home, so we carried off all the gold and silver on which we could lay hands. We were returning home, easy in our minds, when all of a sudden the giant with nine others comes upon us and takes us prisoners, the more shame to us that a hundred men should be captured by ten. They divided us among them, and, as ill luck would have it, I and nine others fell to the share of the one whose riches we had just been lifting. So he tied our hands behind our backs and drove us like so many sheep to his cave; now his stature exceeded thirteen cubits. We offered to pay a great sum as ransom, but he mockingly replied that the only ransom he would accept was our flesh. With that he seized the fattest of our number, cut his throat, and rending him limb by limb, threw him into the pot to boil. He treated the rest of us, all but me, in the same fashion, and to crown it all he forced me to eat of every one of them. Why dwell on the painful subject? When it came to my turn to have my throat cut, I pretended to be a doctor and promised that, if he spared my life, I would heal his eyes, which ached dreadfully. He agreed to these terms for my medical services, and told me to be quick about it. So I took a pint of oil and set it on the fire, and stirring it up with a good dose of lime, salt, sulphur, arsenic, and anything else I could think of that was most injurious and destructive to the eyes, I compounded a salve, and when it was nicely on the boil, I tipped the whole of it on the patient’s head. The boiling oil, streaming over every inch of his body, peeled him like an onion; his skin shrivelled up, his sinews stiffened, and what little sight he had left he lost completely. And there he was, like a man in a fit, rolling his huge body about on the floor, roaring like a lion and bellowing like a bull—a really horrid sight. After long rolling about and finding no ease to his pain, he grips his cudgel like a madman and goes groping and fumbling about for me, thumping the walls and the floor like a battering-ram. Meantime what was I to do? and whither could I fly? On every side the house was walled in by the most solid masonry, the only way out was by the door, and even that was barred with bolts of iron. So while he was tearing about after me in every corner, the only thing for me to do was to climb up a ladder to the roof and catch hold of a beam, and there I hung to it by my hands for a whole day and night. When I could bear it no longer, I had just to come down and dodge between the giant’s legs and among his flock of sheep. For you must know that he had a thousand sheep and counted them every day. And while he kept a fat one he used to let the others go to grass; and whether it was his skill or his witchery I know not, but at evening they would all come trooping back of themselves, and he got the full tale. So when he was counting them and letting them out as usual, I tried to escape by wrapping me in the shaggy fleece of a ram and fixing his horns on my head; and in that guise I mingled with the flock that was going out. On my turn coming to be counted, he feels me all over, and finding me fat, he keeps me back, saying, ‘To-day I’ll fill my empty belly on you.’ Seven times did I thus pass under his hands, seven times did he keep me back, yet every time I gave him the slip. At last, when I came under his hand once more, he drove me in a rage out of the door, saying, ‘Go and be food for the wolves, you who have so often deceived your master.’ When I was about a stone’s throw off, I began to mock him because I had outwitted him so often and made my escape. But he drew a gold ring from his finger and said, ‘Take that for a reward; for it is not meet that a guest should go without a gift from a man like me.’ I took the proffered ring and put it on my finger, and at once I was bewitched by some devilry or other and began to shout, ‘Here I am! Here I am!’ Thereupon, blind though he was, guided by the sound of my voice, he came tearing along, bounding over the smaller bushes, sometimes stumbling and collapsing like a landslide. When he was nearly up to me, and I could neither stop shouting nor tear the ring from my finger, I was forced to cut off the finger with the ring and to fling it at him. Thus by the loss of a finger did I save my whole body from imminent destruction.” This version differs from the Homeric account in several important respects. It represents the giant as merely blear-eyed instead of one-eyed; it describes the blinding of him as effected by a stratagem which the hero of the tale practises on the giant with his own consent instead of as a violence done to him in his sleep; and it adds an entirely new episode in the trick of the magic ring and the consequent sacrifice of the hero’s finger. These discrepancies, which recur, as we shall see, in other versions, confirm the view that the source from which the monk John drew the story was oral tradition rather than the narrative in the Odyssey.

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