The legend of Perseus, Volume II

The life-tokens we have met with in previous chapters may be divided into two classes, namely, such as have some original connection with the hero, and such as are merely arbitrary. Of the first, the most widespread and important is the tree that grows up from some portion of the magical fish. In The King of the Fishes and in the corresponding Norman tale the tree is a rose-tree growing, in the one case from the buried scales, in the other from the buried bones. In one of the stories from Lorraine it will be remembered that some of the fish’s bones were buried under a rose-tree, and there the babes are subsequently found. Their life-tokens are not the tree, but three roses growing upon it. In one of Grimm’s German tales we find two golden lilies growing from two pieces of the fish. Two cypresses arise from the fish’s tail in the Greek story. In the Hungarian Gipsy tale, where the mother becomes pregnant by drinking from an urme’s breast, the urme drops of her milk into two holes in the ground, whence the life-tokens, two oak-trees, spring. The mermaid, in a Highland märchen, gives twelve grains, of which three are for the fisher’s wife and produce three boys, and three are to be planted and produce trees of a kind unspecified. Equally, doomed to death at the hands of a Rakshasi, her fellow-wife, gives her son in a golden vessel a small quantity of her own breast-milk, which will become red if his father be killed, and more deeply red if she herself be slain