Telling Legends Apart: “Animal Lives in Person's Stomach” Stories in Oral Tradition and the Printed Press

Abstract In this essay, I present and analyze Hungarian-language versions of a type of legend collected from the peasant vernacular and published in print. The basis of the story is the Animal lives in person's stomach motif , which is classified as number B784 in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , and which can be supplemented by eighteen additional motifs. Hungarian versions of tale type ATU 285B*, The Snake Stays in the Man's Stomach , contain several additional motifs in comparison to the catalog. This narrative belongs to the type family known in English as the Bosom Serpent . In Hungarian oral variants, collected over the last hundred years, the animal that crawls into a human mouth, or which is swallowed with water, is usually a snake, and less often a newt. It finds its way from the victim's mouth into their stomach and resides there, potentially growing and reproducing and making the victim ill. In oral variants, the remedy typically involves holding the affected person over boiling milk, the steam from which lures out the animal, which slips out via the person's mouth. A feature common to all oral versions is that the narrator never questions the authenticity of what is said — even the animal's magical properties. The integration of modern elements into the story can also be observed in some oral versions, particularly those collected in recent decades: the cause of the illness is sometimes identified by means of an X-ray, or the animal is surgically removed from the patient's body. Some of the print versions are essentially identical to the oral versions. The realism of the way in which the animal enters the body, for instance, and survives there is not discussed, and it is only the outcome of events, such as the means of treatment, that is modernized. In other cases, the fundamental authenticity of the situation is questioned: the person who suspects they have a snake in their stomach is considered mentally unstable and is taken to a psychiatric hospital. Print versions fall into various categories, depending on the extent to which they are linked to the supernatural and how far they have been adapted to modern, urban circumstances.