Page:Cinderella, Roalfe Cox.djvu/20

 xvi has left traces everywhere. As M. Cosquin is well aware, our oldest märchen in literary form are derived from an Egyptian papyrus of the age of the second Rameses. What reason can we allege for supposing that Egypt borrowed them from India, or India from Egypt? We have no evidence at all as to their place of origin. Again, we have the well-known märchen embodied in the Odyssey, the Perseus legend, the Jason legend, all much older than Greek knowledge of India. The Cyclic poems can hardly be placed later than the eighth century B.C. In them we find traces of the märchen of Keen Eye, the constant companion of the hero in märchen, as also of Jason. We have the pursuit of Nemesis, who takes various animal forms, like a character in the Mabinogion, and another in The Arabian Nights, and the Giant in Puss and Boots. Hesiod shows us the transformed character, Metis, swallowed by Zeus, when she is a fly, as the Giant, in form of a mouse, is swallowed by Puss in Boots. Also, in the Cypria we have the girls who produce corn, wine, and oil, as in a Buddhist legend. But this was Greek before Buddha was born, what shows it to have been borrowed from India? The story of the rescue of Hesione from the monster, a common occurrence in märchen, is ancient Greek: what has India to do with the matter? These reinforce the evidence of that regular märchen, the Perseus tale, with the Cap of Darkness, a "property" of märchen known to the Iliad. The Jason legend, as it stands, is a mass of märchen; the first part is the flight of two children, known in Samoyed (Castren), in Grimm, in modern Greek. The second part is our Far-Travelled Tale. Our Odyssey is notoriously a tissue of märchen.

If M. Cosquin still holds that all these, with the ancient Egyptian story of Bitiou, came from India, it would be well for him to demonstrate the point by evidence. There is no trace of ancient Egyptian or ancient Greek acquaintance with India. I am not denying that the märchen of ancient Greece and Egypt may have come from India, in course of commerce and slave-dealing. But