Page 72 - Arabiab Studies (IV)

62 Arabian Studies IV
Bayt Abu Zayd al-Hil5lI.’ The ruler said, ‘You shall be ruler and marry my
daughter.*
He said, ‘God bless you, 1 do not sell my bravery. But we have a useless
fellow with us and we want you to have somebody take him to his
mother.’
The ruler said, ‘Is that all?* ‘That’s all,’ he said. And that’s the end of
the story.
The story, as it was told by ‘All Musallam, is compounded of
well-known motifs, many apparently quite ancient, but the blend
has a charm of its own and, although there are weak points, there
are also some felicitous developments. Certainly we cannot suspect
it of having been improved by a professional, and this in itself is a
virtue.
The theme of the young lad who fancies himself as a bit of a
blade is not very well developed. He appears briefly at the
beginning when his stick-catching prowess promises well for a
future role as a fit companion for a hero, and indeed many young
men who are introduced in Dhofari ‘test’ stories14 do outshine their
mentors: but this one is briefly dismissed as a coward when he
comes face to face with the great snake and he has to be buried
under a pile of covers. He is mentioned again in passing, at the end
of the tale, only to extricate Abu Zayd from a temporary difficulty,
the threat of having to settle down as a respectable married man, a
life which would quickly have put paid to his quests.
It would seem that the stick-catching episode is intended to give
the listeners the wrong impression. When we are told of the Irish
hero, Cu Chulainn, exactly the same thing, namely that in his
boyhood he used to throw his stick in front of him and run and
catch it before it fell, we are expected to realise that he is to be no
ordinary man.15 It is true that some of the heroes of the Icelandic
sagas show incredible prowess or do incredible things in their
boyhood and that their later lives are heroic, but only credibly and
realistically heroic. Egill Skallagrimsson,16 for example, composed
complex poetry when he was hardly out of the cradle, and had
killed his first man, or rather his first boy, by the time he was
seven. However, the reason for the discrepancy in this case seems
to be a deliberate intrusion of mythological elements into a period
of a man’s life which would otherwise be obscure, in order to
convince readers or listeners that from the outset their subject is a
remarkable person. Besides, the facts of a hero’s later life were well
known to the audience and therefore had to be treated in a more
historical manner.
Abu Zayd is, fairly consistently throughout the story, called
Bayt Abu Zayd al-Hilall17 and this, though it is less apparent in the

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