Adun and the Borrowed Body
A cautionary tale in which a beautiful woman who refuses every suitor marries a stranger assembled from borrowed limbs, and escapes his house by stuffing the watchman's alarm horn with oiled bean cakes.
Recopilador
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Cómo se representaba
Evening telling, treated in `yoruba-alo`. There is no song in this tale. The tortoise's alarm cry, "Head, head, Adun is going. She has tied up her calabashes, she has gathered her dishes," is a chanted announcement rather than a sung chorus, and it is the repeated element: it recurs every day that Adun tries to escape, so a teller would deliver it several times with mounting comedy before the day it does not come.
El cuento en breve
This is a cautionary tale about Adun, a beautiful woman who refuses every suitor and then accepts a handsome stranger at market. On the road to his country the stranger's body is reclaimed piece by piece by the men who lent it, until only a head is left. She escapes by taking a babaláwo's advice and stuffing bean cakes into the alarm horn of the tortoise set to watch her. Recorded in English by A. B. Ellis in 1894. Ellis files this among his Tortoise Stories, but Ìjàpá is a minor functionary in it rather than the protagonist, and the tale belongs with the cautionary tales about marrying strangers. It is one half of the best-documented variant pair in this section: the same tale-type is recorded by a different collector 35 years later as `alo-the-head-who-borrowed-a-body`, with a different ending.
El cuento
Ellis's teller opens: "My alo is about a woman named Adun". Adun was very beautiful, and all the men wanted her. They were always entreating her, and she always refused. One market-day a person borrowed legs from one man, arms from another, and a body from a third. He joined them all together and went to the market. He wanted Adun, and he would have her. His appearance pleased Adun, and they talked together. Although he belonged to a distant country, she consented to go with him. She took him to the house and showed him to her mothers, and her mothers said: very well, go with him. Ellis glosses "her mothers" as the wives in the household, which is the ordinary Yorùbá usage in which the senior women of a compound are collectively a child's mothers. The corpus treats the household structure in `owe-family-lineage-compound`. The detail matters to the tale's warning: the marriage is not a girl's private folly, it is approved by the women whose business it was to assess a suitor. They went. On the road, the master of the legs took away the legs, the master of the arms took away the arms, and the master of the body took away the body. Nothing was left but the head. And the head went on, on, while Adun, nearly dead with fear, could not run away. They arrived at the house of the head. Next morning, before he went to work in his plantation, the head said to the tortoise: if Adun tries to run away, sound the horn to warn me. The head had scarcely gone out of sight when Adun took her bundle and began to run away. Then the tortoise sounded the horn, crying: > Head, head, Adun is going. She has tied up her calabashes, she has gathered her dishes. The head ran up and made big round eyes. Where are you going, he asked. I am going to relieve nature, said Adun. Ellis footnotes this as "the ordinary excuse of a native who has no pretext ready". You are running away, said the head. Every day Adun tried to run away, and every day she failed. Then she went to ask the babaláwo what she should do. The babaláwo said: go and buy some ekuru. Buy plenty of them. Soak them in palm oil, and stuff them into the tortoise's horn. Very good, said Adun. Ekuru is glossed by Ellis as a cake made from the flour of a white bean called ere, and he adds that it is very dry, and that a proverbial saying about a tedious visitor runs "He chokes me like ekuru". She did as she was told. Then she took up her bundle and started off. The tortoise took the horn to blow it. The ekuru came into his mouth. He ate, ate, ate, and Adun ran away.
Variantes
The Head (Ogumefu, 1929). M. I. Ogumefu records the same tale-type with a substantially different frame and ending. There the borrowing is told from the Head's point of view, in a country where all the inhabitants are heads without bodies; he borrows a body from an old woman, arms from a young man asleep under a tree "as he did not appear to be using them," and legs from a fisherman sitting mending nets. He wins a bride by throwing all his coins to her at a dance. On the return journey he returns the parts in reverse order, and when the bride sees her husband is merely a Head she runs, and, having neither body, arms nor legs, he cannot follow and loses her forever. Told in full in `alo-the-head-who-borrowed-a-body`. The differences are worth stating precisely, because this pair is the clearest evidence of variant transmission available in this section: - Ellis's version has a captivity and an escape; Ogumefu's has no captivity at all, and the bride simply outruns a head. - Ellis's version requires a helper, the babaláwo, and a trick played on a third party, Ìjàpá; Ogumefu's requires nothing but the woman's own legs. - Ellis's stranger is sinister from the start and takes her to his house; Ogumefu's Head is presented almost sympathetically, an unusual creature who wanted to see the world. - Ellis names the woman (Adun) and not the stranger; Ogumefu names neither. Two independent collectors, 35 years apart, recording the same distinctive plot device with different resolutions, is good evidence that the borrowed-body suitor was a genuine and widespread Yorùbá tale-type rather than one teller's invention. The corpus presents both and does not treat either as the correct version.