Dæmon in the Wood; Trees and Tricksters

Guides, Murderers, and Tacticians:
An Atom of Tradition

The Lamba son-in-law asks himself: “What sort of a father-in-law is this, who calls me to bees in a grass-stalk?” Yet there is no hint of anything in the least fabulous about the Lamba father-in-law up to the moment when he finds the honey in the grass. Then, suddenly, he becomes a weird character and remains so until he is defeated at his own game of concealments by a younger rival with even greater preternatural talents than his. The peculiar location of the bees and their honey is the nub of the fable, and nothing in the story is fabulous until the bees are brought into it. But from the moment when they first appear their peculiarity is somehow a property of the father-in-law. It is as though he were one character before their appearance and another after it.

When Clement Doke wrote down “What a Little Thing Did,” Awalamba did in fact hunt wild honey in the bush surrounding their settlements. That was so typical of their life and so ancient a practice that a remarkable symbiosis existed between them and a certain species of bird they called inguni, which translated means ‘honey-guide.’ Mr. Doke described this creature and its part in the Lamba tradition of fabulous narrative:

This little bird is held in such regard by the natives for its usefulness, that it has in Wulamba four or five distinctive names. In the stories, however, in addition to leading people to the bee-hive in rock or tree, it almost invariably leads them into danger. The bird is about the size of a sparrow, grey-and-white, and is most insistent in its shrill chattering, until followed by the man whose attention it seeks to attract. From bush to bush it flies, leading him on and on till at length it reaches the nest of bees. As a reward it hopes to pick up the young bees scattered about when the honeycomb is taken out. The persistent following of this bird is often a source of annoyance to the hunter, as it thus warns the game that a man is about, and efforts to drive it away often prove unavailing.11

The honey-guide appears in several tales in Mr. Doke’s own collection. One of these, “The Story of Shichinongomunuma and Chilubwelubwe,” is an account of five brothers’ successive adventures with an ogre called Chilubwelubwe, whose name according to Doke means approximately ‘The One Hopelessly Lost.’12

Beginning with the eldest, each of five brothers defies their father’s prohibition against hunting small game toward the west and follows a honey-guide to a bee-tree in that direction. There, at the foot of the tree, the brothers one after another meet the hopelessly lost ogre. He gives each of them food, and when each has fallen asleep after the meal, it eats both him and his hunting-dogs. Only the last and youngest son saves himself from being eaten by remaining awake all night. At dawn, the ogre politely congratulates him on his prudent behaviour and gives him as the hospitality-gift which custom requires a bell containing “two little creatures.” They are to defend the youngest brother against another monster which he must encounter as he returns homeward, namely Shichinongomunuma, ‘The Ogre with the Big Pot at the Back.’

Leaving Chilubwelubwe alive (but cheated of his dinner and the bell), the surviving fifth brother goes to meet Shichinongomunuma, who attacks him twice. In the first onset the pair of uncanny animal helpers from the bell exhaust the ogre so that it faints, and as it falls the pot at its back is shattered. But he recovers, fits himself together, and attacks again, “the pot boiling behind him.” This time the nameless creatures from inside the bell annihilate Shichinongomunuma. The youth proceeds until he arrives at Shichinongomunuma’s village, where only a “vast crowd” of women live, the dead monster’s wives. Here he remains as chief in place of the slain ogre, not returning home.

Much of this story echoes “What a Little Thing Did” and the legend of Samson. Those tales both began with disapproval or reluctance toward exogamous marriage; teleologically, this one does too. A father prohibits his sons’ movements westward, yet by going westward his only surviving son becomes husband to a host of women in the dead Shichinongomunuma’s village. Thus the journey westward is the first step toward exogamous marriage in the logic of this tale.

The journey itself is also an important similarity between this tale and the other two. Once the exogamous bridegroom has decided not to be deterred from marriage by the disapproval or reluctance of a person in authority, his first act in all three cases is to travel. Samson goes to Timnah, the father-in-law takes his young relative hunting, and the five sons set out westward. Each of the three journeys takes its traveller to the vicinity of a food-yielding tree: Samson pauses at the vineyards of Timnah, the father- and son-in-law end their series of hunts beneath a honey-laden Wanga tree, and the five brothers stop beneath another bee-tree where Chilubwelubwe lives. Samson travels alone in the Biblical story (the text is short and literary), but all the Lamba hunters travel in pairs of man and guide.

The honey-guide in “What a Little Thing Did” is of course the exogamous bridegroom himself, the father-in-law who habitually finds honey (seven times, four times in trees). As honey-guide, the father-in-law’s character corresponds initially to the inguni in the story of Shichinongomunuma and Chilubwelubwe, for the inguni’s rôle there is only its natural one of leading the five brothers to the bee-tree, where each then meets Chilubwelubwe, a man-killing creature with preternatural attributes (living alone in the wild and possessing the strange bell with uncanny little animals inside). The inguni in this story is therefore strictly a thing of Lamba reality, like the father-in-law before he discovered the first hive in a grass-stalk. Even Samson behaved plausibly enough before his arrival at the vineyards of Timnah, the Spirit of the Lord notwithstanding (Judges 13:25).

But in all three stories the bees mark a boundary between plain narrative and fable, and the same boundary separates the beneficent, natural character of honey-guide from another, malevolent kind of character who inhabits the ground beneath the bee-tree. No matter whether it is a father-in-law or an inguni-bird, the honey-guide gives way at the bee-tree to a preternatural and mortally dangerous opponent of the person who has followed the guide to the bees’ câche of food in the wilderness. Samson meets his young lion, the five brothers meet Chilubwelubwe, and the father-in-law who was so friendly and helpful at the beginning of “What a Little Thing Did” undergoes a sudden change of character when he finds his first hive of bees, thereafter threatening his son-in-law alternately with death from magical food (the honey from the grass-stalk) and death by falling (from the high Wanga trees). Thus a stable, uniform pattern of associative logic persists in all three stories, regardless of whether one or a variety of characters are used to supply the several pieces of the pattern:

The wild bees in these stories are not only a boundary; they are also a point of equation between two larger halves of the underlying logic. In all three stories the exogamous bridegroom jeopardizes important existing social ties (father and son, mother-in-law and son-in-law, husband and wives) in order to form new ties with aliens. To escape this dilemma, the bridegroom goes a journey into the wilderness to the site of a food-bearing (bee-) tree. He thereby moves out of his social dilemma into an even more serious economic and physical dilemma of choice between the search for profit and avoidance of death, between preserving life and destroying it, between eating and being eaten. The sweet but stinging bees in the wild are a fitting symbol to accompany the bridegroom’s bewilderment among the larger hopes and hazards of the fable.

As I have already said, the fable resolves the exogamous bridegroom’s difficulties through a series of contests between himself and his affinal male kin. In the present three stories, the contests are arranged in sequences of seven and subdivided into the unequal halves of seven: three and four. In the same way that the beneficent and malevolent characters before and after the bees’ hive are represented by nominally different persons from one of these stories to another, so also the seven-fold contest has nominally different forms in each tale. Yet as a part of the fable’s logical pattern, the numerical aspect of the contest is almost cabbalistically regular. The contest between Samson and his Philistine wedding-companions continues without change during the first three of seven days. Then the Philistines change their tactics. Instead of merely trying to guess (or having foreknowledge of) the answer to his riddle as in conventional riddling, Samson’s rivals turn to social skulduggery in order to discover the answer by means that have no place in an ordinary riddling-contest. The father- and son-in-law of “What a Little Thing Did” compete with each other for three days in obtaining honey from the wilderness. When that thrice-repeated form of contest is inconclusive, they change their tactics and during the remaining four days of the seven they play at discovering one another in various wild animal and human hiding-places or disguises, a kind of trickery that has nothing to do with the ordinary conventions of hunting wild food. Four sons go to meet the Hopelessly Lost ogre in the story of Chilubwelubwe and Shichinongomunuma. Since they do not know who or what he is, Chilubwelubwe is able to deceive and eat all four. But his father arms the fifth and last son with foreknowledge of this killer:

The next morning the father said to the son who remained with him, “You children of mine are foolish, because I forbade you to go westward: over to the west are Chilubwelubwe and Shichinongomunuma, the very ones who have made an end of human beings!” The son made reply, “Father, why didn’t you warn us of this while we were all here? Why have you hidden it from us? You merely spoke!” Then that youngest son arose and went right out westward.

After his brothers’ four disastrous encounters with the ogre at the bee-tree, the fifth brother adopts a new tactic. Instead of falling asleep during Chilubwelubwe’s entertainment of him, he remains awake and thereby vanquishes his cannibal host. But his ordeal in the western bush is not yet over; two further encounters with the even more dangerous Shichinongomunuma still await him to complete the full cycle of seven. The tactic that won his contest with Chilubwelubwe also wins him Chilubwelubwe’s marvelous bell as a hospitality-gift, and the fifth brother uses it against The-Ogre-with-the-Big-Pot-at-the-Back in the same spirit of tactical innovation that prevailed against The-One-Hopelessly-Lost. For the fifth brother applies a principle against both the ogres of this story which his elder brethren had not observed and that was not part of the ordinary business of hunting small game: he understood that the successful hunter in the western bush had not only to overcome the game’s avoidance of him, but also to avoid being himself caught and eaten like game by other hunters. By that policy the fifth brother completes the cycle of seven contests, reversing his elder brothers’ four previous failures by his own three successes, once against Chilubwelubwe and twice against Shichinongomunuma.

The conventional phase of the sevenfold contest is dominated by preternatural deceptions and secrets:

Honey in the grass

Chilubwelubwe’s masquerade as kind host

Samson’s secret source of honey

The innovative phase of the sevenfold contest is dominated by disclosure of preternaturals’ concealments and secrets:

Father-in-law’s lechery

Chilubwelubwe’s cannibalism & Shichinongomunuma’s village

Answer to Samson’s Riddle

In each of these stories the honey-trickster forfeits some property as the price of defeat in the contests. Chilubwelubwe gives up his bell, Samson pays his Philistine wedding-companions their thirty sheets and garments, and the Lamba father-in-law returns his widow-bride to her own people, divorcing her in favor of the illusory girl in the bush. Sometimes the honey-trickster in Lamba tradition forfeits his very life, as in another of Doke’s tales, the story of “Mr. Little Hare and What Ate Wulambe.”13

A man-eating lion catches its victims at the foot of a honey-tree. As in the story of Shichinongomunuma and Chilubwelubwe, four men go on four successive days to follow an inguni-bird. It leads them to the tree, and as they are about to lay fires for smoking the bees, the lion eats them; so instead of eating, they are eaten.

The fourth victim is a certain Mr. Wulambe. His mother and marriageable sister survive him, and the sister offers herself in marriage to whomever will destroy “that which ate Wulambe.” Little-Hare, an arch-trickster in Lamba fable, undertakes this labor and goes as the fifth person to follow the inguni, for as usual in these tales, the honey-trickster will be overcome only by invention and trickery craftier than his own. His four precursors had all immediately laid fires to smoke the bees when they reached the bee-tree, but Little-Hare adopts another tactic, ignoring the bees and waiting instead for the lion to appear. When it does, he varies the motif of smoking and asks the lion for some tobacco so that they two may have a social smoke together.

After thus figuratively smoking the lion instead of the bees, Little-Hare proposes to show Lion a clever trick. He creeps into a sack and invites the lion to lift it. Lion accepts the challenge, but Little-Hare secretly slips his claws under a root, and the lion cannot move the sack for all his might. Hare then asks Mr. Lion to enter the sack and to call his wife and all his numerous children into it with him. When they are inside, rather than lift the bag Hare ties it shut and clubs the whole family of lions to death. Later Little-Hare opens the bag to display the corpse of What Ate Wulambe to Wulambe’s sister. Seeing the dead lion, she rewards Little-Hare with marriage as she had promised to do.

This lion entertaining a visitor beneath a bee-tree in the wilderness is a fair equivalent of Chilubwelubwe. It is also like Samson in using the wild bee-hive to decoy its intended victims, and again like Samson in paying a forfeit for its defeat at the hands of a superior trickster who employs unconventional or surreptitious tactics against it.

But this leonine Lamba honey-trickster also resembles Samson’s young lion at the vineyards of Timnah, and not only because it too is a lion. Like Samson’s lion it lies in wait for a would-be bridegroom in the vicinity of food-bearing wood, and there by a wonderful reversal of fortune it dies violently at the hands of the man whom it had intended to kill. Samson slays his lion by physical might and Little-Hare by prodigious cunning, but the result is the same: each subsequently marries by showing the dead lion to his prospective bride. Samson discloses the lion to his bride as the secret of his unanswerable riddle, while Little-Hare opens the sack full of dead lions to reveal What Ate Wulambe. Thus the lion in the Lamba story incorporates features of both Samson and the honey-yielding lion at Timnah, as if Samson and his lion were somehow only varieties of the same character.

These tales of honey-tricksters in Lamba tradition share yet another conspicuous resemblance to the legend of Samson. In all of them, food-trees are the location of crucial disappearances and concealments. Samson conceals everything that happened between himself and the lion at the vineyards of Timnah; keeping that secret was what he needed most to do. The son-in-law in “What a Little Thing Did” first disappears into the fruit of a wild orange tree, then when he is found out of that concealment he plummets out of the last Wanga tree to conceal himself absolutely from his dangerous father-in-law. Four brothers disappear forever in the story of Shichinongomunuma and Chilubwelubwe, eaten by the dissembling honey-trickster Chilubwelubwe under his anonymous bee-tree. Finally, Little-Hare solves the murder-mystery of What Ate Wulambe and brings the criminal to justice by closing Mr. Lion in the sack under that honey-trickster’s treeful of wild bees.

A tradition of oral fable is many tales together, but as in the present instances many nominally distinct tales are in truth only varieties or multiforms of each other. Because of that fact, careful comparison of the tales within a tradition is a main avenue to interpreting them. Moreover, this comparison of stories may, and commonly does, yield a considerable understanding of fabulous elements not only in that tradition but in other even very distant traditions as well. For example, the man-killing beasts and ogres that lurk about food-trees in Lamba stories not only threaten the lives of their visitors, but also entertain them in a polite and sometimes even gracious manner. By analogy, that fact provides a simple explanation for the honey in Samson’s lion. It is, among other things, a vividly memorable and admirably concise way of expressing the man-slayer’s hospitality, for as honey-trickster the lion must be both kind and malevolent toward his guest. This motif of provision, entertainment, or hospitality between the killer underneath the food-tree and his visitor resonates from one Lamba tale to another like a continuous echo of the Samson story:

Comparison of variants and multiforms may thus promote understanding of many individual bits of information in oral narrative which are impenetrably cryptic when isolated from their various equivalents in the tradition at large. In traditions of oral fable, meaning resides in variety or multiformity of expression; above all, motifs mean what they have in common with each other.

The same principle holds true furthermore for whole sets of motifs; the fundamental meaning of a cluster of motifs in any one tale lies in its identity of design with equivalent clusters in other tales that circulate with it in tradition.

Moreover, the equivalence of design that emerges from comparison of tales is a much more basic consideration for interpretative criticism than is the fortuity of a tale’s immediate provenance from this or that linguistically or temporally defined tradition, for oral fable is and has long been fundamentally much the same everywhere. So the design of the Samson legend is the same as the design of many tales in early twentieth-century Lamba fable, and the legend of Samson varies from the Lamba tales in the same manner as Lamba tales vary among themselves.

Variation and multiformity are not however always a matter of one-for-one equivalence with a single different item representing the same basic motif in each tale of the same kind. It would be excessively simple-minded not to recognize that (a) sometimes one item represents a series of different motifs, and (b) sometimes more than one item represents just one underlying motif in a single text of oral fable. Even variation and multiformity are multiform and have diverse modes of variation.

Unitary, (b) variations are of course very common. The ubiquitous food-tree is an anonymous bee-tree in one tale, a vineyard in another, a Wanga tree in a third tale, and so forth. Sometimes duplications occur in one and the same tale. The Lamba son-in-law falls first from a wild orange tree to conceal himself, and later in the same story again from a Wanga tree for the same purpose.

I have already commented on an example of the other, (a) variety of variation, namely the transformation of the father-in-law’s character in the story “What a Little Thing Did.” There the father-in-law passes from the rôle of exogamous bridegroom through the rôle of natural honey-guide and thence on into that of preternatural honey-trickster, while elsewhere in Lamba fable the rôles of guide and trickster are assigned to separate characters.

That was an instance of one nominal character playing two rôles, but there are equally numerous instances everywhere in oral fable of nominally different characters succeeding one another in the same rôle. Shichinongomunuma succeeds Chilubwelubwe as the exogamous bridegroom’s preternatural opponent; in other Lamba stories a single person maintains that part throughout. So too Samson and his lion share the rôle of honey-trickster. First the lion threatens Samson’s life, then posthumously fulfils the second requirement of the honey-trickster’s part, namely that it be host to its guest and give him nourishment. Thereafter Samson assumes the lion’s rôle as honey-trickster by means of the riddle, which being Samson’s secret effectively transfers to him the lion’s self-contradictory duality as simultaneous consumer and provider of sustenance. True to the defunct lion’s nature, Samson too will either harm or benefit the guests at his wedding, the choice turning upon their success or failure against him in a contest of trickery centered on the equivocal lion; for to overcome Samson his foes have only to overcome the lion in his riddle.

Thus the names of characters may change, merge, and be divided from tale to tale as in a kaleidoscope, but as in a kaleidoscope the basic geometry or pattern of their relationships and deeds persists unchanged. The patterns or designs of fable, not the names attached to it, are the essence of fabulous tradition.

Changing the names of motifs and duplicating them in the same story are two of the most usual mechanisms of variation in oral fable. But there are others. The entire cluster of motifs that constitutes tales about honey-tricksters is no less variable as a whole than are the individual motifs in it. One common variation that effects a whole array of motifs is change in their sequence along the axis of the time taken to tell a story. Thus one story-teller narrates the act of exogamy early (“What a Little Thing Did”) while it is deferred to the very end of another tale (“Shichinongomunuma and Chilubwelubwe”). For this reason designs in oral fable give an impression of clustering rather than sequential regularity, despite the linear and non-recursive nature of oral narration. Motifs in fable do not need a fixed sequence to hold them together, because they have about them always the strong adhesive of customary association in the mind of every traditional story-teller, no matter which particular sequence one or another individual story-teller might happen to prefer. It is as if the motifs stand in a circle or orb which the narrator may rationally enter at any point and traverse in any direction, as did Clement Doke’s Lamba narrators when they entered the sphere of fable about honey-tricksters and their trees.

Continue

Table of Chapter Contents

Table of Volume Contents

Index of Whole Archive’s Contents