f the bow ONCE, made answer, 'That I might avenge on thee the swerving
of the first by the points of the rest, lest perchance my innocence
might have been punished, while your violence escaped scot-free.'" [2]

This ruthless king is none other than the famous Harold Blue-tooth, and
the occurrence is placed by Saxo in the year 950. But the story appears
not only in Denmark, but in England, in Norway, in Finland and Russia,
and in Persia, and there is some reason for supposing that it was known
in India. In Norway we have the adventures of Pansa the Splay-footed,
and of Hemingr, a vassal of Harold Hardrada, who invaded England in
1066. In Iceland there is the kindred legend of Egil brother of Wayland
Smith, the Norse Vulcan. In England there is the ballad of William of
Cloudeslee, which supplied Scott with many details of the archery scene
in "Ivanhoe." Here, says the dauntless bowman,

"I have a sonne seven years old;
Hee is to me full deere;
I will tye him to a stake--
All shall see him that bee here--
And lay an apple upon his head,
And goe six paces him froe,
And I myself with a broad arrowe
Shall cleave the apple in towe."

In the Malleus Maleficarum a similar story is told Puncher, a famous
magician on the Upper Rhine. The great ethnologist Castren dug up the
same legend in Finland. It is common, as Dr. Dasent observes, to the
Turks and Mongolians; "and a legend of the wild Samoyeds, who never
heard of Tell or saw a book in their lives relates it, chapter and
verse, of one of their marksmen." Finally, in the Persian poem of
Farid-Uddin Attar, born in 1119, we read a story of a prince who shoots
an apple from the head of a beloved page. In all these stories, names
and motives of course differ; but all contain the same essential
incidents. It is always an unerring archer who, at the capricious
command of a tyrant, shoots from the head of some one dear to him a
small object, be it an apple, a nut, or a piece of coin. The archer
always provides himself with a second arrow, and, when questioned as to
the use he intended to make of his extra weapon, the invariable reply
is, "To kill thee, tyrant, had I slain my son." Now, when a marvellous
occurrence is said to have happened everywhere, we may feel sure that
it never happened anywhere. Popular fancies propagate themselves
indefinitely, but historical events, especially the striking and
dramatic ones,