The Little Bull-Calf
The Little Bull-Calf is an English Romani fairy tale collected by Joseph Jacobs in More English Fairy Tales.
Marian Roalfe Cox, in her pioneering study of Cinderella, identified it as a "hero" type, featuring a male hero instead of the usual heroine.
Synopsis
A little boy was given a little bull-calf by his father. His father died, and his mother remarried. His stepfather was cruel to him and threatened to kill the calf. An old man advised the boy to run away, and he did. He begged for some bread, which he shared with the calf. Later, he begged for some cheese, which he would have shared, but the calf refused. It told the boy it would go into the wild and kill all the creatures it finds, except a dragon, which will kill it. It told the boy to climb a tree, and once it was dead, to skin it and take its bladder, which would make anything it struck drop dead. With it, he was to kill the dragon.It happened as the calf said. Monkeys climbed the tree after him, and the boy squeezed the cheese, claiming it was flint; when they saw the whey, they retreated. The boy set out to find the dragon and kill it. He found a princess who had been staked out for the dragon. He killed it, though it bit off his forefinger. He said he must leave her, but first he cut out the dragon's tongue and the princess gave him a diamond ring. The princess told her father, who asked for him to come, and many gentlemen cut off their forefingers and brought diamond rings and the tongues of all kinds of beasts, but none were the dragon's tongue or the princess's ring.
The boy came, but the king turned him away as a beggar, though the princess knew he was like the boy. Somewhat later, he came back, better dressed, and the princess insisted on speaking with him. He produced the ring and the tongue and married the princess. And they lived happily ever after.
Analysis
Tale type
In his 1987 guide to folktales, folklorist D. L. Ashliman classified the tale, according to the international Aarne-Thompson Index, as type AaTh 511A, "The Little Ox". In a later work, Ashliman classified the tale as both AaTh 511A, and type AaTh 300, "The Dragon-Slayer".English folklorist Katherine Mary Briggs, in her Dictionary of British Folk-Tales, listed the tale as belonging to tale type ATU 300, "The Dragon-Slayer", and type AaTh 511A, "The Little Red Ox".
Folklorist Marian Roalfe Cox, in her work Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin and, Cap O' Rushes, listed the tale as a Hero Tale belonging to the Cinderella Cycle.
American folklorist Stith Thompson noted the similarity of type AaTh 511A with type ATU 511, "One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes", in that the hero is helped by a bovine animal, whose body parts still help the hero after its death.
Origins and distribution
Thompson supposed that the tale type originated from Oriental tradition, and variants exist across Europe, in India, and in North and Central Africa. Similarly, according to Hasan M. El-Shamy, type 511A is reported in Southern Africa and in South Arabia, and is "widely" present in the Arab and Berber cultural areas. In regards to the European distribution of the tale type, Swedish scholar proposed a transmission from Balkanic Countries "west of the Black Sea" to the Baltic Countries, and from there it diffused to the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway, Island and Ireland.American folklorist Leonard W. Roberts reported in a 1955 publication that at least 50 variants of The Little Red Bull were recorded from Ireland until then. In another work, Roberts stated he collected 6 American tales from Eastern Kentucky, and reported tales from Nova Scotia, the Ozarks of Missouri and North Carolina.