The Story of the Hamadryad

Summary

An old widow with three beautiful daughters hopes to marry them to grandees and princes, and does all heavy chores herself. One day, while fishing with a wicker basket, she catches only a snake. She takes it home to kill later, but the snake escapes to a jar of condiment. Days later, when she reaches for the condiment, the snake coils around her arm.

She offers her three daughters to the animal, but it only releases her when the youngest daughter is offered. The youngest goes with the snake to a room, where it sheds its skin to become a human youth, a nat, and returns to snake form each morning. This continues until her elder sisters question her, and she reveals the truth. They convince her to burn the snakeskin, which she does; the nat husband, though in pain, accepts human form.

He later creates a palace for her with his powers and sails off to learn a trade, warning his pregnant wife not to leave. While he is away, her jealous elder sisters trick her into playing on a swing over a river and shove her in. Two large storks rescue her to their nest atop a tree.

Analysis

The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type AaTh 433C, "The Serpent Husband and The Jealous Girl", a subtype of AaTh 433, "The Prince as Serpent". In this type, a girl marries a snake who gives her jewels and becomes human after the snakeskin is burned; another girl imitates with a real snake and dies. Folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther later subsumed types AaTh 433, 433A, and 433C under a new type, ATU 433B, "King Lindworm". Professor Stuart Blackburn noted that some Southeast Asian variants include a fruit tree owned by the snake, found among groups in central Arunachal Pradesh and the Kucong and Nusu people of Yunnan. Type 433C also contains motif J2415.7, where a stepdaughter married to a snake appears decorated with jewels, and the stepmother desires a snake for her own daughter, who is swallowed instead.

Variants

In his 1961 revision of the tale type index, Stith Thompson indicated five variants of the type, found only in India. Thompson and Warren Roberts's work Types of Indic Oral Tales links this tale type exclusively to South Asia. However, Stuart Blackburn reported variants of the snake-husband story (where a girl marries a snake and is fortunate, and a jealous girl marries another snake and dies) in India (Nagaland and Assam), Southeast Asia, China, and among Tibeto-Burman speakers in central Arunachal Pradesh and the extended eastern Himalayas, including the Apatani, Nyishi, Tagin, Garo, and Lisu peoples.

Taiwanese scholarship also locates subtype 433C variants in Cambodia and Indonesia. San Shwe Bu stated that the story was also familiar to the Burmese. Bernard Houghton published an Arakanese tale titled The Snake Prince, translated from a Burmese manuscript furnished by Maung Tha Bwin, Myôôk of Sandoway. In that variant, a man named Sakkaru from fairy-land (Tâwatinsa) is reborn as a hamadryad by order of King Sakrâ (Indra).

A washerwoman offers her daughter Dwê Pyû to the snake in exchange for figs. The snake follows her home and coils around her arm; the woman summons Dwê Pyû to marry the snake. Later, Sakkaru leaves his snakeskin to attend a council in Tâwatinsa; Dwê Pyû, thinking him dead, burns the skin on her mother's advice.