O Beng

In the tale the Roma of Transylvania told in the nineteenth century, the devil comes when he is called. The girl Mara lives in a hut on a mountain, in a fair forest, with four brothers, a father, and a mother. She loves a handsome rich huntsman who passes her every day without a word. She sings him a song, and he pays no heed. So she calls the devil, and the devil comes holding a mirror.

The story is called “The Creation of the Violin.” It was published in German by Heinrich von Wlislocki, who collected it among Transylvanian and South Hungarian Roma, and translated into English by Francis Hindes Groome in his Gypsy Folk-Tales of 1899 as tale number 37. The devil in the story is O Beng, the devil of the Roma. In the tale’s own telling, the instrument he fashions from Mara’s family is how the violin came into the world, and it ends in the hands of a poor Roma who makes whole towns laugh and weep as he chooses.

A second tale under the same name gives the violin to a fairy queen named Matuyá, who strings it with her own hairs. It is the devil version that the Roma tell about O Beng.

Appearance

O Beng has no fixed image. He comes from an oral tradition, and no old bestiary plate or church fresco records his face. In the tales he is a tempter and a shape-changer. The closest thing to an iconography is the mirror he carries in the violin story, the object that claims whoever looks into it, and the place he holds in the creation tales as God’s rival.

Function

What the beng does is bound up in what the word does. O Beng is the Romani devil, but the word carries more than the Christian figure. The dictionaries run beng to Sanskrit vyaṅga, “spotted” or “frog,” and more than one linguist has called that connection semantically odd; the etymology stays an open question. In Romani, God is o Del, from Sanskrit deva. The two words come out of the same inherited vocabulary and stand at opposite ends of it.

The scholars who work with Romani tales resist the simple reading of the beng as evil incarnate. The Italian anthropologist Leonardo Piasere calls the beng a playful demiurge who regards himself as the ruler of the alternation between order and disorder, a figure closer to a trickster than to Satan. The linguist Domenico Giuseppe Muscianisi studies a creation tale recorded in three versions among Vlax Roma in Hungary, Transylvania, and Sardinia, in which God and the devil are both present at the making of the world. He reads that pairing as a relic of Iranian dualism, the Zoroastrian opposition of the Good Spirit and the Evil Spirit in the Avesta. On this reading the beng is the last surviving relative of the Zoroastrian counter-creator, carried west inside the Romani language itself.

In the violin tale the beng works as a soul-claimer. The mirror is the claim. Mara and the huntsman have both looked into it, so both belong to him. He offers help anyway, for a price: her four brothers, then her father, then her mother. He strings the fiddle with the brothers, one thicker, one thinner, the third thinner still, the thinnest of all. The father becomes the box. The mother becomes the bow, her hair the horsehair. Then the devil plays, and Mara rejoices; he plays on, and she weeps. He tells her to play when her beloved comes. She plays, the huntsman hears her, and he comes to her.

The price is worship. After nine days the beng returns and says, “Worship me, I am your lord.” Mara and the huntsman refuse, and he carries them off. The fiddle stays in the forest, where a poor Roma finds it and plays. From that day, the tale closes, the Roma plays so that the village laughs and cries as he chooses.

Cross-Cultural Connections

O Beng belongs to a family of stories in which the first instrument is made from a body. The closest parallel on this site is Sirdon, the trickster of the Nart sagas, who strings the first harp from the sinews of his murdered sons after the Narts serve them to him at a feast. The two figures sit at opposite ends of the Indo-European world and tell the same terrible invention: the instrument is born from sacrificed flesh, and the music passes to the people who were wronged.

The Grimms’ “The Singing Bone” (KHM 28) is the same motif turned to justice. A bone of the murdered man is made into a horn or flute that speaks the murderer’s name, and Bolte and Polívka, in their commentary on the Grimms’ tales, pointed to the Romani tale as an analogue. The Scottish ballad of Binnorie, in which a harp is strung with a drowned girl’s hair and tells the story of her murder, belongs to the same family. Vladislav Kornel recorded a close Hungarian-Gypsy variant at Guta and Almas in 1890, in which the girl is called Marika.

Groome noticed a coincidence he refused to push. The Romani word for devil is beng, and in Santali, the language of the Munda peoples of India, a spirit is called bonga. He recorded the echo in his notes and left it there.

Beyond the Roma, the violin carried a devil reputation across Europe. The association sharpened in the nineteenth century around Paganini, whose playing was rumoured to be the work of the devil; Maiko Kawabata’s study of the myth, published in Current Musicology in 2007, traces what actually made Paganini “demonic.” The Roma version of the myth differs in a telling way. The devil builds the fiddle, but he never keeps the music. In the related tale of the fiddler who sells his violin to the devil, the fiddler holds back his soul: “I gave thee the fiddle, but not my soul which plays on its strings.” The devil returns the instrument, unable to make it speak. The power stays with the player.

The mirror has its own parallel across the Atlantic. The Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, whose name means “smoking mirror,” carries the mirror that shows people themselves and undoes them. He too is a trickster-demiurge who works on the border of order and chaos. Nobody proposes a historical line between the Romani devil and the Aztec god; the resemblance is a reading, not a descent. It is the shape of the figure that recurs.

Modern Survival

The beng never left the Romani language. The word survives in dialects from Welsh to Finnish Kalo Romani, in Angloromani as an adjective for anything bad, and in the slang of neighbouring languages: Czech bengo, Romanian benga.

The violin the tale hands to the Roma became the instrument of the professional Roma musicians, the lăutari who served the courts and taverns of Hungary and the Balkans from the eighteenth century. Panna Czinka, born 1711, was history’s first primás, a pipe-smoking woman who led Hungary’s first Roma band. János Bihari so moved Franz Liszt that Liszt wrote of the “magic violin” whose tones fell like drops of nectar. The Transylvanian legend kept the devil in the trade: the secret to becoming a great bandleader, villagers said, was to sleep for six weeks with an egg under one’s arm, rub the yolk on the strings, and call on dark powers.

The tale is still told. In 2002 the Roma storyteller Zlatko Mladenov performed “O Řom taj o beng,” the Rom and the devil, for the recordist Mozes F. Heinschink in Sofia. In it the devil offers the old bargain, souls for accomplished tasks, and the Rom defeats him with an impossible request: straighten one curly hair of Claudia Schiffer. The devil tries for years and bursts with rage.

What O Beng finally is has no settled answer. The sources give the Christian devil and the older trickster, and both appear in the same tales. What the tradition does not waver on is the direction the violin travels. The devil builds it, and the Roma play it. The poor Roma in Groome’s tale picks the fiddle up off the forest floor, and the villages laugh and cry as he chooses.

Sources

• Groome, Francis Hindes. Gypsy Folk-Tales. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899. No. 37, “The Creation of the Violin,” pp. 131ff.
• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. “Die Erschaffung der Geige [II]” in Vom wandernden Zigeunervolke: Bilder aus dem Leben der siebenbürgischen Zigeuner. Hamburg, 1890, pp. 221-223.
• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. Volksdichtungen der siebenbürgischen und südungarischen Zigeuner. Vienna, 1890, pp. 194-195.
• Herrmann, Anton. “Die Erschaffung der Geige.” Österreichisch-ungarische Revue 16 (1894), pp. 52-53 (Romani text with German translation).
• Kornel, Vladislav (Ritter von Zielinski). “Gypsy Anecdotes from Hungary: I. The Fiddle.” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 2, no. 2 (1890), pp. 65-66.
• Piasere, Leonardo. “Il trickster e l’infinito: alcune riflessioni a partire da esempi rom.” QRO (Università di Siena) 1 (2008).
• Muscianisi, Domenico Giuseppe. “The Good and the Evil: An Avestan Central Theme in a Peripheral Romani Folk-tale through Language and Myth.” Poli-Femo (2022).
• Turner, R. L. A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages. London: Oxford University Press, 1962-1985.
• Hübschmannová, Milena. “Beng (Devil).” ROMBASE Cultural Database, 2003.
• Bolte, Johannes, and Georg Polívka. Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, vol. 1. Leipzig, 1913, p. 272.
• Kawabata, Maiko. “Virtuosity, the Violin, the Devil… What Really Made Paganini Demonic?” Current Musicology 83 (2007), pp. 85-108.
• “O Řom taj o beng” (The Rom and the Devil), performed by Zlatko Mladenov, recorded by Mozes F. Heinschink, Sofia, 27 March 2002. RomArchive.