The Poor Woman and the Àranran Bird
A co-wives tale in which a bird of prey takes a poor woman's baby and returns it with a fortune, and kills the child the head wife brings to repeat the trick, ending with the head wife executed by the king.
This is the second of Ellis's two co-wives tales, and it is the one where he tells us the type was common: "this story is also about the discomfiture of an ìyálé, which is a favourite theme," adding that "the plot resembles the foregoing" . A poor subordinate wife loses her baby to an àranran, a bird of prey, sings for it three times, and is given first coral beads, then valuables, then the child itself, unharmed. The head wife takes another wife's child to the same tree to repeat the trick, and the bird kills and eats it. The tale ends with the head wife tried before the king and put to death.
Its song retains Yorùbá words, which makes it one of very few texts in this section where any of the original survives.
The tale
Ellis's teller opens: "My alo is about a poor young woman" .
There was a poor young woman who had a child. She was so poor that she could not buy a cloth to wear, and her child was held on her back with a plantain leaf.
She used to go into the forest to cut firewood to sell. One day she went as usual. There was a tall tree, and under it she put down her child to sleep in the shade.
Now in this tree there was an àranran, which Ellis glosses as a bird of prey, "probably from ra, to hover" . While the young woman was cutting firewood, the àranran seized the child and carried it up into the tree.
When she had made up her bundle of wood, she came back to where she had left her child and could not find him. She looked everywhere and ran to and fro, crying bitterly. At last she looked up, and saw her child in the claws of the àranran, high up in the treetop. And she began to sing.
Àranran, eiye igbo, igbo, Give me back my child, oh, igbo. Here is a rope of tie-tie, igbo; Quickly let my child down, igbo.
- eiye bird (modern orthography ẹyẹ)
- igbo forest, bush (modern orthography igbó)
- eiye igbo Ellis: "answers to our 'wild bird'"
- tie-tie not Yorùbá. Ellis glosses it as "an Anglo-African term for the various kinds of parasitical vines which are used as substitutes for cord," sometimes called bush-rope
Translator: A. B. Ellis
Ellis tells us exactly why the Yorùbá is here: "the native words are here retained in order to preserve the rhythm" . That is a translator's decision reported openly, and it means the surviving Yorùbá is not a fragment of a transcription but a deliberate rhythmic residue: igbo falls at the end of all four lines as the recurring beat, and Ellis judged that translating it would destroy the song's shape.
The text is printed without tone marks and without subdots, in 1894 orthography, and is reproduced here in that state. Supplying diacritics would supply a reading, and the corpus does not do it. The modern forms are noted in the gloss for identification only.
What survives, then, is a partial song: a Yorùbá refrain word carrying the rhythm, with the sense-bearing lines rendered into English. The corpus records this as better than nothing and considerably less than a transcription. Note also that tie-tie, which sits in the third line as though it were a Yorùbá word, is not one: it is West African colonial English, and its presence in the printed song is a mark of the translator's hand rather than the teller's.
When the young woman had sung this, the àranran threw down to her a bag of coral beads. She ran to the bag and opened it, but her child was not in it, so she threw the bag down and sang again.
Then the àranran took all kinds of valuable property and threw them down to her. And the mother looked here and looked there as the things fell, but her child was still not there, so she sang the same song a third time.
Then the àranran took the child and flew down with him and placed him gently on the ground.
The young woman ran to her child, took him up and put him on her back. She also picked up all the things the bird had thrown down. And from being poor, she now became rich.
After returning home she took twenty strings of coral beads and went to offer them to the ìyálé. But the ìyálé, when she learned how the young woman had come by the beads, refused them.
The refusal is the same hinge as in alo-the-palm-oil-seller-and-the-goblin, and Ellis's footnote explaining that a refused gift signals enmity is discussed there.
The ìyálé took a child belonging to one of the other wives and carried it into the bush. She put it under the tree of the àranran and went away to cut wood.
But while she was away cutting wood, the àranran carried off the child, and killed and ate it.
When the ìyálé returned to the foot of the tree and could not find the child, she began to sing as the young woman had done. Then the àranran voided copiously into a bag, tied up the neck of the bag, and threw it down. She ran to it, picked it up and untied it, found it full of filth, and threw it away. Then she sang again. This time the bird made water in a large calabash and let it fall, so that it broke upon her head. And she sang a third time.
Then the àranran took up the bones of the child and threw them down at her.
The ìyálé ran and looked at the bones, and cried out: this is not my child. It is the child of another woman that this bird has killed, believing it to be mine. And she went away.
When she reached home, the mother of the child came to the ìyálé for her little one. And the ìyálé said that the child was quite well, but was not with her.
Many times the mother came to ask for her child, and when three months had passed and the child had not been restored, she carried the case before the king.
She told the king everything: that the ìyálé had taken the child from her hands, and that three months had passed and it had not been brought back.
The king summoned the ìyálé and asked her: what have you done with the child? Where is it? And the ìyálé answered: what do you suppose I should do with it?
Then the king said to the assembled people: if this woman belonged to you, what would you do with her? And all the people replied: if she belonged to us we would put her to death.
And the king said: let her then be put to death. And so the ìyálé was killed.
What the tale does
The mechanism is a three-fold repetition in which the same song produces exact opposites, and the audience counts to three twice. The bird's three answers to the poor woman ascend, beads, then all kinds of valuables, then the child. Its three answers to the ìyálé descend into degradation, excrement, urine broken over her head, and finally the bones. The structure is a mirror, and the song is the fixed point: identical words, sung by two women at the same tree to the same bird, producing wealth and a living child in one case and filth and a skeleton in the other.
What separates them is not the words but the errand. The first woman is looking for her son. The second is trying to reproduce a result, and she brings a child who is not hers to do it with. The tale makes this explicit in the most damning line either woman speaks: on being shown the bones, the ìyálé says "this is not my child," and goes away. She is not wrong, and it is the worst possible thing to say. She has just watched a child be killed because she put it under a bird's tree, and her response is to note that the loss is not hers.
Then the tale does something the other co-wives tale does not: it goes to court. The bereaved mother waits, asks repeatedly, and after three months takes the case to the king, who summons the accused, hears her non-answer, and puts the question to the assembled people before pronouncing. The corpus notes that this is a compressed but accurate picture of a Yorùbá judicial hearing, and owe-justice-judgement-court collects the proverb material. The king does not sentence on his own authority; he asks the assembly what they would do, and they answer, and he ratifies it. The sanction is communal, which is the same structure the analysis of Ìjàpá àti Ìgbín in yoruba-alo identifies as the tradition's characteristic resolution.
The corpus marks as analysis the observation that the tale's real subject is not greed but the treatment of other people's children as usable material. The ìyálé's crime is not envy, which the tale treats as ordinary, nor even the refusal of the gift. It is that she solved her problem by spending a child who belonged to a woman with less power than her, and that the community, asked directly, said death.
Variants
The companion tale, alo-the-palm-oil-seller-and-the-goblin, is the same shape: poor subordinate wife enriched by a supernatural encounter, gift refused by the head wife, imitation attempted, child killed. Ellis's note that this is "a favourite theme" is a statement about the type's frequency in the material he collected, and the corpus records it as a collector's observation rather than as a measured finding.
Two differences are worth marking. In the goblin tale the head wife sends her own daughter and loses her; here she takes another wife's child and loses nothing personally, which is why this version needs a trial and the other does not. And here the punishment falls on the instigator rather than on the imitating child, which makes this the more morally direct of the pair.
No Yorùbá-language version was located by this compiler.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. The song is sung six times in the tale, three by each woman, and Ellis prints it in full each time rather than abbreviating, which suggests his teller did the same. With a Yorùbá refrain word closing every line, this is among the clearest cases in the section of a song built for an audience to carry.