Ìsọ̀kun and the Baby
A childless queen who has been refused by every god steals a newborn from a sleeping woman by the roadside, and is exposed when the hungry baby quiets instantly at its real mother's breast.
This is a tale about Ìsọ̀kun, the childless wife of King Dekun, who disappears from the palace for weeks, travels to the shrines of all the gods asking for a child, is refused by every one of them, and on the way home steals a two-day-old baby from a woman asleep by the roadside. She presents it as her own. The deception is undone by the baby's hunger. Recorded in English by M. I. Ogumefu in 1929 .
The tale
A certain King Dekun had a wife named Ìsọ̀kun who bore him no children, on which account there was great unhappiness in the palace .
One day Ìsọ̀kun disappeared and was absent for many weeks, and though search was made, no trace of her could be found .
The truth was that she had set out to visit the shrines of all the gods, in the hope that one of them would promise her a child . But though she travelled far and wide, the gods of all the trees and streams and rocks refused her prayer.
When she was at last nearing home again, she came upon a poor woman asleep by the wayside with her baby two days old .
Ìsọ̀kun stole the baby and hastened to the palace, where she informed the king that she had disappeared in order to give him the joyous surprise of his little son .
There were great rejoicings in the palace, sacrifices were made, and the drums beat loudly .
Meanwhile the real mother awoke and discovered that her baby had been stolen . She ran into the town distracted and insisted on searching in every house, but without success.
At last she came to the palace and insisted on entering there also, which was possible at that moment because all were celebrating the arrival of the king's heir .
All this time the baby cried with hunger, and as Ìsọ̀kun could not feed him, she invented other reasons for the crying and sought in vain to pacify him without arousing suspicion.
Drawn by the cries, the mother entered and snatched the baby to her breast, where it was at once contented.
In a few moments the deception was made clear, the mother departed with her child, and Ìsọ̀kun, ashamed and fearing the anger of the king, fled from the palace and never returned.
What the tale does
The mechanism is that the lie is exposed by a body that cannot lie, and the tale is built so that the exposure requires no investigation, no witness and no accusation. Nobody catches Ìsọ̀kun. The baby is hungry, she cannot feed it, and the crying does two things at once: it draws the mother through the palace and it makes the proof available the instant she arrives. The child quiets at the breast, and that is the whole trial.
The corpus notes as analysis that this is a judgement device of unusual elegance, because it is self-executing. Compare alo-the-poor-woman-and-the-aranran-bird, where a stolen child produces a three-month wait, a formal complaint, a royal summons, an assembly and an execution. Here the same crime is settled in a sentence by an infant's mouth. The difference is that in the aranran tale the child is dead and only testimony remains; here the child is alive and is its own evidence.
The tale is also careful about the order of Ìsọ̀kun's failures. She does not begin as a thief. She begins as a woman who has gone to every shrine there is, and the tale says every god refused her: the gods of the trees, the streams and the rocks. That is a comprehensive refusal, and the tale reports it without explanation. She is not being punished for anything the tale names. women-motherhood-childbearing-and-the-body treats childlessness and its weight, and owe-children-parenthood-inheritance the proverb material.
What she then does is not merely to take a child but to construct a public event around it: rejoicings, sacrifices, drums. The theft would have been recoverable; the announcement is what makes it unsurvivable, because it commits the palace and the king to a story that a hungry baby can dismantle in front of everyone. The corpus notes the same structure in alo-buje-the-slender and alo-the-king-and-kini-kini, where a claim is proclaimed publicly on a fixed day and the proclamation is what destroys the claimant.
Note who is not punished and what is not resolved. There is no sentence, no court and no royal anger enacted: Ìsọ̀kun flees "ashamed and fearing the anger of the king," and the tale ends there. She is removed from the story by shame before authority reaches her, which is the same ending as alo-buje-the-slender, where a woman covers her head and runs into the bush. owe-shame-reputation-being-seen collects the material on shame as sanction.
And the childlessness is never addressed. The tale that opened with "great unhappiness in the palace" over a barren queen closes with the queen gone and the palace presumably still without an heir. Ogumefu does not return to it.
The other mother
The poor woman is worth attention because the tale gives her almost nothing and she does everything. She is asleep by a roadside with a two-day-old infant, which places her at the bottom of the tale's social order; the queen who robs her is at the top. She wakes, runs into the town "distracted," and searches every house in it, then insists on entering the palace, which the tale notes she could only do because the celebration had the doors open.
So the recovery depends on a poor woman refusing to be turned away from a palace during a royal celebration. The corpus marks as analysis that the tale, without commenting, has made the entire outcome rest on her persistence, and that the celebrated event, the arrival of the king's heir, is what let her in.
Variants
No Yorùbá-language version and no second collection of this tale were located by this compiler. The record consulted is silent on variation and on any song.
The motif of a disputed infant resolved by a test is widely distributed internationally, most familiarly in the judgement attributed to Solomon. This compiler notes the resemblance and asserts no relationship: there is no judge here, no threat to the child, and no choice offered to the claimants. The test is not administered by anyone.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. No song is recorded, and Ogumefu's stated removal of songs (alo-ogumefu-1929-as-a-source) means the absence is not evidence. The tale's climax is a sound rather than a speech, a baby crying through a celebration and then stopping, which in performance is a moment for a teller to hold.