Der Sohn der Teriel (French: Le Fils de l'Ogresse; English: The Son of the Ogress) is a Berber folktale,Swahn, Jan Öjvind. The Tale of Cupid and Psyche. Lund, C.W.K. Gleerup. 1955. p. 48. first collected in Kabylia in German by ethnologist Leo Frobenius and published in 1922, about a human maiden who marries a youth that is the son of a man-eating teriel, loses him due to her breaking his trust, and goes after him at his mother's home, where she is forced to perform hard tasks for her.
Scholars relate the tale to the international theme of the Animal as Bridegroom or The Search for the Lost Husband, wherein a human princess marries a supernatural husband or man in animal form, loses him, and goes on a quest to find him. Similarities are also recognized between the tale and the Graeco-Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche.
Summary A father is set to leave on voyage, but asks his four daughters what presents he can give them when he returns. The three elders say they want beautiful dresses, while the youngest asks for a peculiar present: a pigeon that dances alone in a meadow.
The father finds the dresses in the trip, but still haven't found the pigeon, nor has found anyone who could give him information about it. After he reaches the border of a forest and sees the little bird. He tries to jump onto it to capture it, but a mysterious booming voice orders him to stop his action. The father tries to explain that the bird is a gift for his daughter, and even offers to buy it, but the voice - that belongs to a person named Asphor'ulehóa, the son of a teriel - refuses. Asphor'ulehóa relents and lets the man take the bird, and makes him promise to give him his youngest daughter for wife. The man knows that a teriel is a flesh-eater creature and fear for his daughter's life, but Asphor'ulehóa assures no harm shall be done to her, and tells him that he will come to their house in the shape of a camel.
The man returns and gives them the presents. When he is on his deathbed, he tells them that a camel shall appear. Some time later, the camel appears at their door. Every one of the four daughters climbs onto it, but it does not move. Only after the fourth daughter climbs onto it with the pigeon does the animal move and takes the girl to another place, already furnished. The girl notices someone comes to her bedroom every night and says she must not light any lamp.
Some time later, her sisters visit her, and she tells them she has lived a comfortable life, but she has never seen the true face of Asphor'ulehóa. Her sisters convince her to spy on him when he comes at night. That night, she lights a candle and conceals it with a pot lid. Her husband comes to bed and falls asleep. She takes off the pot lid and raises her torch at him: Asphor'ulehóa is a beautiful youth. She also notices some little angels ("malaika", in the original) near his body. The little angels tell her they are weaving a dress for Asphor'ulehóa's wife. Asphor'ulehóa wakes up with a startle and admonishes his wife for breaking his trust. He takes his garments and leaves in a hurry.
The girl follows after him, who hurries his steps towards his mother's house. When he arrives there, his human wife reaches him. Asphor'ulehóa tells her the place belongs to his mother, a teriel, who may devour her. So he lets her climb a nearby palm tree and tells her so stay there until his mother promises on his name not to do her any harm.
Asphor'ulehóa enters the house and his mother, the teriel, greets him. She says she will fetch some water to drink in a nearby fountain. She goes outside with a jar and sees the reflection of the girl in the water. Thinking there is a person in the water, she reaches into the reflected image to take it and devour it. She fails and breaks the jar. She goes home to get another jug and to try getting the girl she sees in the image. After some tries, she notices the girl on the tree and tries to convince her to climb down. The girl tells her she must first promise on her son's name not to harm her.
Asphor'ulehóa introduces the girl as his human wife. The next day, the teriel orders her to clean their wide courtyard as soon as she leaves, and not to leave any speckle of dust, otherwise she will devour her. The girl tells her husband about it; Asphor'ulehóa knocks on a rock to summon a large flood of water to clean up the courtyard in no time.
The next morning, the teriel mother orders her daughter-in-law to fill a cushion/pillow with feathers of all birds by nightfall. Asphor'ulehóa tells the girl to go up the hill and shout into the air that Asphor'ulehóa is sick and needs a pillow/cushion, and the birds shall appear to give her their feathers. The third task is for the girl to return every single feather to their original owner. Asphor'ulehóa tells her to go to the same hill, summon the birds, thank them for their help and return their feathers.
The next task is for her to separate water from milk that the teriel has mixed up. Asphor'ulehóa says they can't do it and admits his teriel mother has tried to kill her the past few days. That night, the teriel returns home and sees that the task was not done. Asphor'ulehóa tricks his mother to invite her sister for a feast with the girl as the main dish, but he hides his wife and roasts a bull. He opens up a pit in the dining room, fills it with fat and embers, and closes it with soil. He invites his mother and aunts to the dining room and directs them to stay on that spot. He reminds his mother of her oath and intends to enforce it: he commands the ground to open up and swallow the teriel and his aunts, who are consumed in the fire.
Asphor'ulehóa and his human wife leave the place forever and return to her father's house.Frobenius, Leo. Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas. Band II: Volksmärchen der Kabylen, Band 2: Das Ungeheuerliche. Jena: Diederichs. 1922. pp. 281-293.
Analysis Tale type Scholarship classifies the tale in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 425, "The Search for the Lost Husband", and relate it to the ancient Graeco-Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche,Binder, Gerhard. Amor und Psyche. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968. pp. 296-297.Megas, Georgios A. Das Märchen von Amor und Psyche in der griechischen Volksüberlieferung. Πραγματειαι της Ακαδημιας Αθηνων, Volume 30. Athens: Grapheion Dēmosieumatōn tēs Akadēmias Athēnōn, 1971. p. 71 (footnote nr. 1).Dermenghem, E. "Le mythe de Psyché dans le folklore nord-africain". In: Revue africaine 1º—2e trim., 1945, pp. 48-49. as written down by author Apuleius in the 2nd century CE.
Motifs The supernatural husband The heroine's husband, Asfar Lehwa, is also the name of a male character from tales in the Kabylian oral repertoire.Yacine, Tassadit. "Imaginaire et création en Algérie: L’exemple kabyle". In: Literatures orals i nous espais de comunicació a la Mediterrània. Simposi Internacional celebrat els dies 1 i 2 de març de 2002 a l’Institut Europeu de la Mediterrània (IEMed). Lluís Calvo and Maria-Àngels Roque (dirs.). Barcelona: Residència d’Investigadors CSIC-Generalitat de Catalunya, 2004. p. 37. In these tales, he helps the heroine, his wife, against the impossible tasks given by his ogress mother. In this regard, according to researcher Emmanuel Plantade, the supernatural husband possesses magical powers, and his arrival is preceded by some sort of weather phenomena, like storm or rain. He also appears in the Kabylian tales with a name like "bird (of the storm, of the air, of the wind, of passion)".
The ogress antagonist The teriel (tzeriel or tseriel) is described, in Kabylian folklore, as a frightening and monstrous creature with an anthropophagic appetite. She appears to be the female counterpart of the Warzen, another creature, and both populate the Kabylian folktale corpus as antagonists.Zerar, Sabrina; Riche, Bouteldja. "Of The Contrastively Gendered Presentation of Monsters In Algerian-Kabyle Folklore". In: Humanities and Social Sciences Review, 03(05): 33–42 (2014). .Frobenius, Leo. Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas. Band II: Volksmärchen der Kabylen, Band 2: Das Ungeheuerliche. Jena: Diederichs. 1922. pp. 1-2. In Western (French) works, she may be translated as ogresse or ogress.Farida Boualit et Zahir Sidane, «La littérature orale berbère à l’épreuve de l’écriture de Nabile Farès: lecture de la culture en texte». In: Multilinguales [En ligne], 3 | 2014, §27, mis en ligne le 04 juillet 2018, consulté le 02 janvier 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/multilinguales/1602; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/multilinguales.1602
The heroine's tasks German philologist Otto Weinreich compared the heroine's tasks in the tale to Psyche's in the Graeco-Roman myth: just like Psyche is given 4 tasks by her mother-in-law, Venus, the heroine of the Berber tale is given four tasks (three she accomplishes, and one - to separate water from milk - she fails).Weinrich, Otto. Ausgewählte Schriften II: 1922-1937. Amsterdam: Verlag B. R. Grüner, 1973. p. 279. .
Swedish scholar remarked that, in tales of "The Search for the Lost Husband" type, the task of sorting seeds or grains occurs in Mediterranean and Near Eastern variants of type ATU 425B, "The Witch's Tasks". According to researcher Emmanuel Plantade, the task of grain sorting, done with the aid of ants, appears in most of the variants collected in Kabylie. In this regard, linguist and Berberologist Henri Basset believed in the antiquity of the motifs of the grain-sorting and the ants as the heroine's helpers in Berber tradition. In addition, in the Berber corpus, the heroine is also forced to gather feathers, done by summoning the birds.
Variants Commenting on an Italian translation of the tale (titled Lo sposo invisibile, or "The Invisible Husband"), professor Annamaria Zesi claims that the story is "diffusa" ("spread") in Kabyle among the Berbers.Storie di Amore e Psiche. A cura di Annamaria Zesi. Roma: L'Asino d'Oro Edizioni. 2010. p. 214. .
Scholarship locates at least 4 more variants in Kabylia: Gold Bud, The Bird of the Air and two homonymous tales titled The Bird of the Storm. Another version, titled Son of the Ogress, was collected from the Sefrou region, in Morocco, and another titled The Story of Seffar Ihwa (Arabic: Seffar Ihwa, 'whistling of the wind'), by Bezzazi.Plantade, Emmanuel and Nedjima. "Libyca Psyche: Apuleius and the Berber Folktales". In: Apuleius and Africa. Editors: Benjamin Todd Lee, Luca Graverini, Ellen Finkelpearl. Routledge, 2014. p. 177.
Kabylia Gold Bud