A Murut fairy tale
G.C. Woolley published “A Murut Fairy Tale” in 1947 in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, presenting a narrative collected from Angkas bin Dabus, a Tambunan Dusun who had heard it in Keningau. The tale, known as “The Story of Baiagong and the Red-Stalked Coconut,” is a classic animal-helper story set in the Keningau district of British North Borneo, and Woolley frames it as possessing sufficient local colour to warrant publication despite its structural parallels with folklore of other races (p. 145).
Summary
The narrative follows Baiagong, a great hunter of Kampong Keningau, who steals the winged cloak of the youngest of seven fairy princesses from Kayangan (Fairyland) while they bathe at a pool on the headwaters of the Liawan River. The princess, abandoned by her sisters, is taken in by Baiagong and eventually married to him, though the union is complicated by the hostility of his old mother, who resents the fairy wife for not having been formally asked in marriage according to Murut custom (pp. 145–146). When the princess discovers her hidden cloak, she attempts to fly home with her son but cannot lift his weight, and departs alone, leaving instructions for Baiagong to follow her to the pool where an old man fishes (p. 146).
Baiagong’s pursuit up the Liawan is structured around a series of animal-helper encounters: he releases trapped fish, builds a bridge of a dead branch for ants crossing the stream, frees a squirrel from a trap, cuts a deer from a rotan noose, and rescues a firefly from a spider’s web (pp. 147–148). Each act of kindness is repaid in turn when the Rajah of Kayangan sets him a sequence of seemingly impossible tasks—retrieving beads from a deep pool, collecting scattered rice grains from scrub, harvesting langsat from a nearly severed tree, racing a fairy prince to a distant tree, and identifying a single cup among over a thousand in darkness. The animals he had befriended each solve one task in sequence (pp. 148–150).
The tale concludes with Baiagong being swept out of the fairy long-house through the bamboo floor by hostile house-mates who despise his “human smell,” and waking in his own house on Earth with an axe, a tabor drum, and a pink-stalked coconut nut. The coconut grows into a famous palm whose nuts are distributed throughout the district, the drum and axe become precious heirlooms (pesaka), and his white finger—lost when he dipped it into a crocodile-infested pool the fairies had tried to force him to bathe in—is preserved as a visible memorial (pp. 151–152).
Key Findings
- The tale was recorded from Angkas bin Dabus, a Tambunan Dusun, who had heard it in Keningau where he lived for some years (p. 145).
- The fairy princess’s departure is framed as equivalent to a divorce under the Rajah’s authority, and she is declared betrothed to a Prince of Fairyland (p. 148).
- The Rajah’s final test requires identifying the princess’s cup among “over a thousand cups” in a pitch-dark store room (p. 150).
- The coconut palm is known among the Muruts as Pisau Magoriding and among the Dusuns as Piasau Dayang (p. 152).
- Baiagong’s white middle finger, lost when he dipped it into the crocodile pool, was cut off by his heirs before burial and preserved as a visible memorial “to be seen, it is said, even to this day” (p. 152).
- The fairy drum (gendang) struck terror into enemies and accompanied Baiagong on raids; the axe with which he took countless heads became a pesaka heirloom (p. 151).
Conclusion
Woolley presents the tale as a vehicle for preserving a specific Murut-Dusun oral tradition from the Keningau district, one that encodes local ethnographic details—Marut marriage customs, the Main Mensilad head-feast, the pesaka system of heirloom transmission, and the toponymic and botanical identity of the red-stalked coconut—within a narrative structure broadly comparable to international animal-helper folklore.
Context
- This is a colonial-era ethnographic recording: Woolley, a British administrative officer in British North Borneo, collected the tale from a local informant and published it in the MBRAS journal as part of the Society’s ongoing programme of documenting indigenous oral traditions.
- The piece is a straightforward transcription with minimal analytical commentary; its historiographical value lies in preserving a variant of the tale from the Tambunan Dusun tradition before the mid-twentieth century.