From the Mediterranean to Ireland, or to the Karelian shore of the White Sea, the pattern of the Two Trees was current wherever oral narrative tradition persisted in modern Europe. Shortly before the Second World War, an outstanding conteur named Matvey Mixailovich Korguyev from the village of Keret’ in Karelia dictated to the Russian collector A. N. Nechayev a fabulous tale about a hero who was personally a piece of hewn wood. Like Art of Leinster, this hero too came into the world because of a barren marriage:150
An agèd couple have no children. The man cuts a piece of pine wood in the forest and carves it into the likeness of a boy. His old wife rocks the wooden image in a cradle for three years, whereupon it comes to life, walks, talks, and names itself Ivan Sosnovich (John Pineson).
At the moment of the boy’s animation, the old wife is preparing to take dinner to her husband, who is away plowing in the fields. The new-“born” boy volunteers to do this chore as his first act in life, and so goes food in hand to meet his foster-father. The old man invites the lad to eat with him, but he refuses, preferring instead to continue the plowing while his father rests. In this he fails, because he is too prodigiously strong to work harmoniously with the mare that pulls the plow. It is his first and last attempt to succeed as a grower of plant food. Eventually he releases the mare to graze while his father sleeps in the afternoon.
When the foster-father awakens, he sends the boy to fetch the mare home. The lad finds that a wolf has killed the mare and is eating it. When the wolf threatens to eat him too, John Pineson slays it with his bare hands. He then reports to his foster-parent that though their mare is dead, the wolf will prey no more on the livestock of others. Arriving home, the man recounts the boy’s exploits to his old wife with the comment that whereas they had hoped in getting John to gain a provider for their old age, he probably will not remain long in their house.
The next day John asks his father to have the blacksmithy make an axe for him weighing 1,800 lbs. When it is ready, the boy must himself bring it home from the forge since it is too heavy for the blacksmith to deliver. Only then for the first time does John consent to take a meal at his foster-parents’ table, saying that when the meal is finished he will go to cut wood in the forest with his new axe.
The amount of wood which he is able to cut in a day is exactly proportionate to the weight of his axe. For each Russian measure of weight in the axe-head (пуд, = 36 lbs.) John cuts one Russian cord of wood (сажень, = 2.13 meters). At the end of the first day, he complains that the axe is too light, and orders another twice as heavy—one hundred пуд—to be made ready for his next day’s work. For the third day he requires one of a hundred and fifty пуд—5,400 lbs.
At the end of the third day he takes all three axes back to the smithy, saying that he will need them no more. The smiths are now to forge for him a war mace equal to the combined weight of the three discarded axes, three hundred пуд (10,800 lbs.). At the third attempt, the smiths satisfy John, who pays them for this work the richest fee they have ever received. Next he tells his foster-parents that he is going to leave them, and that they must not expect to see him ever again. He gives them plenty of money to last through their old age in addition to the huge surplus of wood which he cut in the forest during his hewing phase. (No explanation is given as to where John got the money to pay the smithy and his foster-parents, but in the Russian peasant context, the source is obvious: cut wood was a prime source of cash in peasant economy.)
Taking leave permanently of his foster-parents, John Pineson also undergoes a fundamental change of character. Carrying his enormous war mace, John sets out on an aimless journey. Eventually he comes to a pair of great live oaks with an old man standing between them. From time to time this ancient knocks the two trees against each other for sport. John greets him in a ‘run’ of formulaic, commonplace folk-tale diction:
― Здраствуй, богатырь Дуби́ня!
― Здраствуй, здраствуй, доброй человек. Нет, не есть я богатырь Дубиня. Вот Иван Сосновиць волка убил, вся земля дрожала, вот э́то богатырь!
― Ну, дак вот я есть Иван Сосновиць.
― Возьми меня, брат, с собой.
― А куда?
― Куда голова несёт.
― Ну, пойдём.
“Hail, Sir Oakman!”
“Hail! Hail, good man. But I am not he who should be called ‘sir.’ He truly is Sir Knight who slew the wolf, when the very earth trembled, Sir John Pineson!”
“Truly it is I, John Pineson, who am here before you now.”
“Then take me with you, brother.”
“But where shall we go?”
“Whithersoever your fancy leads you.”
“Let us be off, then.”
They come to a third person who stands between two mountains, from time to time knocking them together for sport. His name is Gorynja, “man of the mountain(s).” When he has joined the footloose band, it proceeds until it reaches a wide river. Between the river’s banks a great mustachioed fellow named Usynja (Mustachio) provides a ferry-service for travellers, transporting them over the water on his mustaches. He too leaves his place to join John Pineson’s vagrant company.
They come to a large and prosperous farmstead, but find no one at home. Entering the kitchen, John tells Oakman to slaughter and roast for their dinner five of the oxen from the herd in the farmyard while he and the other members of the band explore the neighborhood. During their absence Oakman begins to feel apprehensive. Soon a little old man appears with overgrown fingernails and a beard grown down to his elbows. This ancient pulls behind him forty wagonloads of hay. When he reaches the farmyard, he releases the cattle that are penned there so that they may drink, and counts them as they go out at the gate. Finding the herd short five head, the old man discovers Oakman in the kitchen and beats him ferociously.
For all his erstwhile prodigious strength, Oakman is helpless against the weird ancient and runs away to hide outside under a corner of the house. When he recovers, Oakman goes back into the house, which is once again deserted, and finds that his cooking fire has gone out. After rekindling it, he lies down on a bed to rest. There his comrades find him when they return. They ask him why he does not join them in eating the dinner which is now ready. Oakman replies that the smoke from the cooking fire has given him a headache, so that he prefers to remain in bed.
On the following two days, first Mountainman and then Mustachio are left to do the cooking. The same events occur as previously, except that at each meal the band complains of too little to eat. So instead of five, seven oxen are butchered the second day, and ten the third day. None of the company tells his comrades who have not yet stayed behind to cook that he has been attacked by the vicious old man.
On the fourth day John Pineson is to be the cook. He slaughters twelve oxen, and when the old man appears, he tears out the old curmudgeon’s beard, whereupon nothing remains of the ancient except his head. This John nails to the wall in another room of the house for his comrades to see when they return at the end of the day. But while they are inspecting it, it pulls free of the nails and rolls away out-of-doors. John pursues it with his mace, but before he can overtake and smash it, it escapes down a hole into the underworld.
John divines that the monstrous head has gone into the netherworld to raise an army wherewith to attack them. He tells his band that one of them must go below to prevent that. The others refuse, so Pineson himself must go. They slaughter all the remaining cattle to make a strap of leather long enough for his descent into the deep hole.
In the netherworld, John meets successively three maidens, each of whom is engaged in embroidering. They are respectively a princess, a queen, and an empress. At each pull of their threads one, two, and three armed soldiers leap out of their needlework. Promising them marriage in the world above, Pineson induces them to throw their embroidery frames into the fire. Then he kills the old man, who in the netherworld reappears as a giant recovering from the wounds which John had earlier inflicted on him with hammer and nails.
John’s three companions, who have remained at the upper mouth of the hole into the underworld, pull up the princess, queen, and empress on the leathern strap by which Pineson had descended. But when John’s turn comes to be hauled up out of the earth there are only enough women for the three companions to marry; so, fearing lest he will be the only one left unwed, Oakman cuts the leathern strap and abandons Pineson to an uncertain fate below.
There John wanders until he comes to an open plain with a great pine growing green at its center. A fine herd of cattle graze peacefully beneath the pine, unattended by any herdsman. Disconsolate, Pineson sits beneath the green pine, when from its crown he hears the voices of unfledged eaglets calling for him to rescue them. Their mother has been too long away from the nest, and they are starving. Pineson butchers one of the nearby herd of cattle to feed the eaglets. They warn him to hide behind the tree when their mother returns for fear she might kill him for their dinner. When she does return, the eaglets narrate Pineson’s kindness, whereupon he reveals himself and she offers him her services.
He asks to be flown home to his own country. She requires a supply of water and meat for the journey; he slaughters forty more of the neighboring herd for this provision. But during the flight, the eagle consumes all of the meat before reaching their destination; Pineson is obliged to cut away the calves of his own legs and feed this filthy meal to her to sustain her until they land. When it is time for him to dismount from the eagle’s back, he complains that his damaged legs will no longer support him. The eagle regurgitates his calves, which adhere to his legs and grow back in place at once. Subsequently, Pineson finds his three erstwhile companions dead, marries exogamously, and inherits his father-in-law’s kingdom.
As a traditional intellectual experiment, the advent or ‘birth’ of John Pineson is a remarkably successful fiction. It is a true fiction of sundered reality (for in this sense all good fictions are true). It disintegrates the real-life event of birth into its basic conceptual components, permitting each component to be considered and analyzed in a pure state unqualified by impingement on it of the other elements that together constitute the complexity of an actual birth in the real world. So, unlike a real, uterine child, Pineson comes into the world by well separated, sequential stages.
First his ‘mother’ suggests to his ‘father’ how the boy can be brought into being, relying upon the authority of a tradition of womanly knowledge for proof that the suggested process will work. Then, in an entirely separate event, the old man forms the physical person of the boy. Only when he has done and finished his work does the woman get possession of the still lifeless form. The father’s part in the process is one of pure motion: going to and from the forest, hewing, and carving. In this respect, his (pro-)creative activity is indistinguishable from the ordinary economic activity that sustains him and his wife. Going to and from the forest and the fields and executing the appropriate skilled movements in each location are the very essence of a male peasant agriculturalist’s life.
Appropriately then, the wooden child’s mother continues to ‘rear’ him once his form is complete by subjecting him to unremitting motion in the cradle for three full years. Thus from the moment he is cut from the tree, John Pineson is kept continuously moving; that, says the story, is the fundamental characteristic of human life as contrasted with the life of trees or other vegetables, which though alive, are incapable of such kinesis. In this manner the attention bestowed on him first by his father and then by his mother is a true education in the essential of living. (It is, of course, an education which may benefit the attentive hearer of the tale even more than it does the tale’s wooden hero).
Three years from conception is a reasonable elapse of time between the emergence of a real child and its first discharge of small social duties; in this regard Pineson is not different from any normal uterine Russian peasant boy. What is different about him is the fictitious conflation of his first movement (physical) with his first act (sympathetic) of economic and social contribution.
Just as human life differs from arboreal life by its mobility, so too hewn wood differs in its utility from green wood by its detachment and capacity to be moved. Reared for three years with the lesson of movement constantly upon him, Pineson finally adopts that trait, learning as it were simultaneously to be both hewn and human. And consequently, from the moment of his coming to life (that is, from the moment he achieves automobility) he is a veritable bundle of reciprocities. His very first thought is to compensate the parents who by their movements have brought him into the world. So he spares his mother, who for three years has kept his cradle in continuous motion, the necessity of moving her husband’s dinner to a distant field. Similarly he attempts to move on behalf of and instead of his father, assuming the hard labor of moving the plow in the heavy, wet earth of spring.
But once he has been divorced from the immobility and natural increase of the green, John Pineson cannot return to it. He fails immediately in his one and only attempt to lead the life of a peasant agriculturalist. He cannot plow, for his movements are too powerful. Nor can he sit still merely waiting for vegetable processes to do their work for him: he puts the mare to graze, but the earth’s uncompensated donation of green, growing food to the mare fails to yield any benefit in his presence. Indeed, every kind of gratuity fails where this hewn wooden youth goes, especially free benefits or entertainment. He refuses to share the dinner which his father gratuitously offers him after he has brought it to the field, and then similarly refuses to let the predatory wolf feed gratuitously on either himself or his father’s dead mare. Keenly defensive of property rights, John is a true cosmotact, who enforces the compensatory laws of civilization not only for his own good but also for the good of a larger polity. So he kills the wolf when it has killed his parents’ mare, not because it has also threatened him, but in order that, as Korguyev made him say,
Больше уж он ни у кого кобыл йись не будет.
Never again will it eat the mares of other men.
No less than those other, more familiar cosmotacts Samson, Beowulf, or Art of Leinster, Pineson has enormous strength in his bare hands, for bare-handed he destroys the wolf. Being himself an implement hewn of wood, he needs no other. In time he accomplishes other feats greater than this, but this is the one by which he later remains forever aphoristically famous even among the men of distant and alien lands.
John’s foster-father realizes from the incident of the wolf that though he and his wife had hoped through getting Pineson to provide for their old age, the boy is too talented a cosmotact to remain long in their house. But since provision for their declining years is the price of his very existence, Pineson cannot in his nature fail to pay it, even if he does not choose either to live or to marry among his own people. The question of whether the debt is fungible never arises, for his sense of reciprocity is so strong that he manages to repay his parents in exactly the same coin that bought his being. They gave him his material existence by an act of hewing, and he in turn provides for the material needs of their existence by more hewing. So the hewn child becomes the hewing adult. Only after he has acquired his first axe does he consent to eat for the first time at his parents’ table (where they further provide for the material needs of his existence), but even then, eating is only a reciprocal act of preparation for labour in his parents’ interest.
Having hewn for them as earlier they hewed for him, John Pineson is free to leave home. His first step in that direction is to exchange his axes for a mace. His sense of exactitude in exchange is unfailing; the mace is exactly the combined weight of the three discarded axes, and the fee which he pays to the smiths is far greater than any they have been paid before, just as the mace which they have forged for him is far greater than anything they have forged before. Not until he has actually left home does Pineson’s meticulous sense of reciprocity begin to fade. He is, to be sure, outward bound toward green wood, which he reaches through a two-stage progression.
Himself a hewn conifer, Pineson progresses toward a live conifer of his own species by way of green deciduous wood—the two great oaks between which the first of his travelling companions, Dubinja (Oakman), stands. In the zone of these deciduous green trees, compensatory and law-abiding relationships cease; Pineson’s companions all imitate Oakman, who enlists gratuitously and follows aimlessly in Pineson’s wandering band. Together, the four lawless travellers prey mercilessly on the unprotected herd of gentle herbivores in the weird old farmer’s farmyard, without ever a thought of compensation. While Pineson and the unhewn Oakman consort, comrade does nothing to forewarn comrade about mutual jeopardy, and the old man who by his careless absence at one moment gratuitously nourishes visitors from his penned herd at the next moment beats them unconscious in an impulsive accession of violence.
In the netherworld, Pineson’s relations with the old man degenerate further into open warfare and bride-theft with no form of trickery or exploitation barred and no form of recompense even suggested. And when finally the old man is dead and the brides-to-be have been taken from him without compensation (as earlier his cattle were taken without compensation), the number of nubile women does not reciprocate with the number of men to be married. It is logical (in the logic of the Two Trees’ pattern) that Dubinja, the first companion who impulsively befriended Pineson, is now the one who impulsively abandons him. Dubinja owes his bride and his hope of marriage to Pineson, but coming as he does unhewn from between the two green oaks where Pineson first found him, he is an unreciprocating monster of ingratitude.
Bereft of friends, desolate of resources, and abandoned in the deserted netherworld, Pineson continues his aimless wandering toward a final encounter with monstrous uncertainties at the last and most fabulous of this tale’s green trees. It is a great green pine, and in its precinct a great herd of gentle, unresisting herbivores grazes.
Contradicting this fine resource of unexploited nourishment, the unfledged carnivore eaglets starve, unable to predict when or whether their mother will return to the nest to feed them. Hiding himself behind the tree, Pineson duly reveals himself again, as the expected element of hide-and-seek in the framing pattern of the Two Trees requires, when the elder eagle finally does appear. The demand she unforeseeably makes (eating his flesh) after gratuitously lending her fabulous aerial mobility to Pineson’s escape from the netherworld is the negation of his equally but differently fabulous mobility: she eats the calves from his legs, leaving him unable even to stand upright, much less to move of his own accord. But then, in a sudden reversal, the eagle restores his flesh as quickly and as unexpectedly as she had taken it. And whereas early in this tale Pineson’s hewing other wood among his own people at home seemed to unite him with them but in the event only led to his separation from them, so his hewing of himself in the presence of the alien eagle seems at first to result in his inability to separate himself from her, but in the event leads to reunion with his elected society, the emperor’s daughter to whom he is betrothed.
Korguyev, the Russian-speaking Finn on the shore of the White Sea close beneath the Arctic Circle, and the Bantu Mwana Mbirika in Central Africa did not need in any way to know each other’s tales for each to reproduce the same array of narrative around the Two Trees. Their common teacher, the poetic tradition each in his own language, assured far more effectively than they personally or any historic intermediaries between them could consciously have done that they would tell the same tale in their unrelated idioms. The notion of migratory narrative is simply extraneous to such cases as these. And so I maintain it has always been since fabulous narration became established in human custom, because that which is narrated in oral tradition is inseparable from the act of narrating. It is the traditional process of making a tale, with its firm and universal rules about the association of certain images and generic ideas that determines the likeness of geographically distant narrative specimens, not any vague “wandering” of isolated motifs or supposedly discrete “tale-types.”