Page:Cinderella, Roalfe Cox.djvu/16

 xii and the elemental theories of the origin of myths, and of their detritus, popular tales, did not convince me. The linguistic processes by which words and phrases of forgotten meaning developed into the myths, did not seem to me to be satisfactory solutions. I observed that tales similar to the Aryan in incident and plot existed in non-Aryan countries—Africa, Samoa, New Guinea, North and Central America, Finland, among the Samoyeds, and so forth. As it was then denied that tales were lent and borrowed, from people to people, I looked for an explanation of the similarities. The same stories were not likely to be evolved among peoples who did, and peoples who did not, speak an Aryan language, if language misunderstood was the source of tales. I also reached the conclusion that, when similar incidents and plot occurred in a Greek heroic myth (say the Argonautic Legend or the Odyssey) and in popular tales current in Finland, Samoa, Zululand, the tales are not the detritus of the heroic myth, but the epic legend, as of Jason or Odysseus, is an artistic and literary modification of the more ancient tale. The characters of the tale are usually anonymous, and the places are vague and nameless. The characters of the epic are named, they are national heroes; the events are localised; they occur in Greece, Colchis, and so forth. So I concluded that the donnée was ancient and popular, the epic was comparatively recent and artistic. Next I observed that the tales generally contained, while the epics usually discarded, many barbaric incidents, such as cannibalism, magic, talking, animals. Further, I perceived that the tales varied in "culture" with the civilisation of the people who told them. Among savages, say Bushmen, or in a higher grade Zulus, the characters were far more frequently animals than in European märchen. The Bushman girl who answers to Medea is not the daughter of a wizard king, but the wife of an elephant. The same peculiarity marks savage religious myths. The gods are beasts or birds. These facts led me to suppose that the tales were very ancient, and had been handed down, with a gradual refining, from ages of savagery to ages of civilisation. But the peasant class which retains the tales has been so conservative