Journeys and quests have long been recognized as essential components of oral fable in all its genres. But this pattern discriminates between ordinary travel and the kind that may have fabulous results. The contrast is often very explicit, as in the following tale recorded in August, 1964, from the Turkish conteur Sukru Dariji in Kavshit village, Sungurlu, in the province of Chorum:160
A potentate is disabled by blindness and tells his three grown sons that the only remedy for his impaired vision would be a handful of earth from a place where his horse’s hooves have never trodden. The eldest son undertakes the quest, travels for three months in a straight line, collects a handful of dirt, and returns the same way. It is dirt often trodden by his father’s horse. The second son journeys six months outward bound, and comes to a high wooded mountain. Climbing to the peak, he collects a handful of dirt, descends, and returns home. Again the dirt is useless.
The third son finds a dragon under whose head there is dirt uniquely never trodden upon by his father’s horse. He obtains the dirt and three peerless brides for himself and his brothers. But on his way home his brothers waylay him and cast him into the netherworld, into which he descends on the back of a black ram. By means of a great bird he is able to fly home, where he avenges himself and claims his rewards.
The third son’s vertical journeys down into the underworld on the back of a ram and up into the air on the back of an eagle-like bird of prey expose him to hazards and bring him rewards which his more horizontally pedestrian competitors cannot experience.
The pattern of the vertical journeys is maintained in myriad nominal motifs. The same Turkish conteur, Sukru Dariji, who told the story about the blind ruler’s three sons also told a tale about Şemsi Banı, Emporer of the Pigeons:161
An old woman begging for food observes a caravan of pack-animals burdened with comestibles and follows it. The caravan enters the sea and goes to a mansion on the bottom. The crone hides in the underwater palace and observes a host of pigeons gather there one by one. Each of the pigeons is transformed into a young man, and these dine together opulently. Their emperor is eventually domesticated, abandoning his aquatic and aerial haunts to live as a ruler in stable residence among men.
The capacity for vertical journeys distinguishes this pigeon-king from other men as the best husband for the mortal heroine of the story and makes him the best heir to her father’s imperial properties; for more than any other of her suitors he is an habitual traveler in both the underworld of the sea-bottom and in the aerial zone of bird-life.
The superior competitor for fabulous rewards and benefits may be ingeniously endowed with vertical capacities of various descriptions; one way or another traditional oral fabulists keep the pattern intact. Another Turkish narrator, Mehmet Anli of Samsun, conferred the pattern of vertical journeys on his hero without obliging him to digress from the direct pursuit of bliss, by associating him with two travelling-companions whose sole function was to represent the prior achievement of prodigious journeys up and down:162
A young prince falls in love with a vision seen in a dream, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. He is warned that many have searched for her in vain for many years, including his own father. He sets forth on the quest nevertheless, and is joined on the way by two other young travelers who subordinate themselves to him, the Prince of Stars and the Prince of the Seas. He possesses the girl where all others have failed.
The well-known story of the Frog Prince, Number One in the famous early collection of German fable by the brothers Grimm, provides another example of the pattern of vertical journeys:163
A princess goes one day to amuse herself in a cool grove of trees. Her plaything, a golden ball, falls into a deep well under an old linden tree in the grove. A man bewitched in the likeness of a frog descends into the depths of the well to retrieve her toy, then pursues the girl up the stairs of her father’s palace and into the royal dining room. After it has dined at the royal table, it gains entrance to the girl’s bedchamber. When in anger she lifts the frog and sends it flying through the air, it becomes a handsome youth and possesses her.
Thus even so unlikely a hero as a frog needs the pattern of the vertical journeys, down to the depths of the well and flying through the air high in my lady’s chamber, to achieve its fabulous destiny.