The Head Who Borrowed a Body
A tale from a country where the inhabitants are heads without bodies, in which one Head borrows a body, arms and legs to win a bride, and loses her when he returns them on the way home.
Recopilador
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Cómo se representaba
Evening telling, treated in `yoruba-alo`. No song is recorded, and given Ogumefu's stated omission of songs (`alo-ogumefu-1929-as-a-source`), the absence of one here is not evidence that the tale had none. What the tale offers a teller is a repeated structural beat, three borrowings and three returns, each a short scene at a named place, which is the shape a teller can lengthen or compress at will.
El cuento en breve
This is the tale of a Head from a country where the inhabitants have heads but no bodies, who sets out secretly to see the world, borrows a body from an old woman, arms from a sleeping young man and legs from a fisherman, wins a bride at a dance, and loses her on the road home when he gives the borrowed parts back. Recorded in English by M. I. Ogumefu in 1929. It is the second half of the best-documented variant pair in this section. Ellis recorded the same tale-type 35 years earlier with a different frame and a much darker ending, as `alo-adun-and-the-borrowed-body`. The two are compared below.
El cuento
There is a certain country where the inhabitants have heads but no bodies. The Heads move about by jumping along the ground, but they never go very far. One of the Heads desired to see the world, so he set out one morning secretly. When he had gone some distance he saw an old woman looking out of the door of her cottage, and he asked whether she would lend him a body. She agreed and lent him the body of her slave. Later he came upon a young man sleeping under a tree, and asked whether he would kindly lend him a pair of arms, as he did not appear to be using them. The young man agreed, and the Head thanked him and went on his way. Later still he reached a river bank where fishermen sat singing and mending their cone-shaped net. The Head asked if any one of them would lend him a pair of legs, as they were all sitting and not walking. One of the fishermen agreed, and the Head thanked him and went on his way. But now he had legs, arms and a body, and so appeared like any other man. In the evening he reached a town and saw maidens dancing while the onlookers threw coins to those they favoured. The Head threw all his coins to one of the dancers, and she so much admired his handsome form that she consented to marry him and go to live with him in his own country. Next day they set out. But when they came to the river bank, the stranger took off his legs and gave them back to the fisherman. Later they reached the young man, who still lay sleeping under the tree, and to him the Head gave back his arms. Finally they came to the cottage, where the old woman stood watching, and here the stranger gave up his body. When the bride saw that her husband was merely a Head, she was filled with horror, and ran away as fast as she could go. Now that the Head had neither body, arms nor legs, he could not overtake her, and so lost her for ever.
Variantes
This tale and Ellis's Adun are the same tale-type recorded by different collectors in 1894 and 1929, and setting them side by side is the closest this section comes to demonstrating transmission. What is constant. A suitor assembled from borrowed parts; a woman won by his appearance; a journey during which the parts are reclaimed in sequence; the woman's discovery of what she has actually married. What differs. | | Ellis 1894 | Ogumefu 1929 | |---|---|---| | Point of view | The woman's | The Head's | | The suitor's nature | Sinister, unexplained | A curious creature from a country of Heads | | How the parts are got | Borrowed, no scene given | Three scenes, each with a polite request | | Where the reclaiming happens | On the road to his house, by the owners | On the road home, returned by the Head himself | | The woman's situation after | Captive in the Head's house | Free, running, never caught | | How she escapes | A babaláwo's plan, bean cakes in Ìjàpá's alarm horn | Her own legs | | Ìjàpá | Present, as the Head's watchman | Absent | | The woman's name | Adun | Not named | | Tone | Horror with a comic escape | Comedy with a warning inside it | The corpus presents both and treats neither as the correct version. Two independent collectors, three and a half decades apart, recording a plot device this distinctive is good evidence that the borrowed-body suitor was a genuine and widespread Yorùbá tale-type. The divergence in tone and outcome is evidence of something else, which is that the type was available for different purposes: Ellis's telling is about a woman trapped and needing help to get out, Ogumefu's is about a marriage contracted on a false appearance and dissolving the moment the appearance is repossessed. The assembled-appearance idea also appears in this section in a third form, in `alo-the-feast-in-the-sky`, where Ìjàpá makes wings from feathers collected one from each bird and is stripped of them one at a time as the guests leave. The corpus notes the resemblance as a recurring Yorùbá narrative image rather than as a relationship between the tales.