Beardlessness and Baldness

Beardlessness and Baldness Thursday, July 13, 2023 A common human villain in the folktales is the kioses (in demotic Greek spanos), or beardless man. There's a Pontic tale that begins, "There once was a man with one son. He told the boy, "I want you to listen to my advice. Wherever you meet a beardless man, ignore his greeting and return home." After the father dies, the boy does his best to heed that advice, but soon finds that he is lives in a land of beardless men and therefore has to do business with them.  The beardless man isn't hairless because of an accident, or because, like the man in one of Aesop's fables, has two wives who each want him to look more like her (while he sleeps , the older one plucks all his dark hairs, the younger all his gray hairs). Instead he is the closest thing to a human ogre. Warren Walker and Ahmed Uysal, the folklorists of Turkish oral narrative, describe the Turkish version of the beardless man like this in Tales Alive in Turkey:  "The ko:se is a predatory creature who gains his livelihood by treachery of her imaginable kind. Avaricious, crafty, cruel, and vicious in all his actions, he lacks completely any human feeling for others, and he is accorded none. In the folktale, his sole purpose seems to be to injure people, personally or materially, and then become the object of vengeance that usually culminates in his death. Although human in form--he is never young, much less a child, and so we do not knw his origins--he is in effect, an ogre, a monster...." (p.9) We find the beardless man as a character in at least five tales: "The Beardless Man" (Kars, c 1963), "The Scaldhead and the Beardless Man" (Kotyora/Ordu c.1946), "The Beardless Man and the Prince" (Kotyora/Ordu c.1953), "The Beardless Man" (Ofis 1914), and "The Seven Brothers and the Beardless Man" (Sourmena 1914).  So a character that is common to both Pontic Greek tales and Turkish tales is the beardless man. Another Turkish character, called Keloghlan ("bald boy") is even more common than the ko:se, but very different in how he is perceived. Barbara K. Walker, another folklorist focusing on Turkish tales, writes in her introduction to her collection Once There Was and Twice There Wasn't: "Usually the youngest of three brothers, and rejected for his apparent stupidity, Keloghlan manages to blunder through one experience after another and to win over all other contenders a the end. Lucky almost beyong belief, he is generally good-natured and openhanded, but shrewd and not above the playing of tricks to destroy the giant or win the princess. He is the yong peasant who becomes the padishah (king); he is the guesser of riddles, solver of dilemmas, and righter of wrongs. In short, he is the young peasant hero. The bald head which gives Keloghlan his name is actually the result of a scalp disease, but such a boy is considered lucky and is envied, rather than pitied. In fact, Keloghlan is so popular a figure that often a prince or a princess will assume a Keloghlan disguise in order to achieve remarkable goals."  There is no equivalent character in Pontic tales, although youngest sons who turn out to be clever or lucky abound. What we do find, however, is characters who, like those Turkish princes or princesses, assume a disguise as a scaldhead (someone with a scalp disease that has made their hair fall out). Plus, in "The Scaldhead and the Beardless Man," the (ATU 1653) "Robbers Under the Tree" variant from Koryora/Ordu, the scaldhead's approach to the uncomfortable proximity of the robbers is what saves both him and his brother. In "The Scaldhead and the Embezzler" from Imera (c1939) at one point in her series of unfortunate adventures, the daughter of the house escapes her latest persecutor by exchanging clothes with a shepherd and wrapping her head in a goat’s intestines to look like a scaldhead. Whether or not these elements are signs of Turkish influence on Pontic Greek folktales, they at least show a common sensibility.