Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/13

 Rh these the elements of familiar European stories are interwoven (as in Egypt) with the legends of native and local gods, heroes, and sacred animals. To some of us this will be proof that they had existed in Southern America before Pizarro came. Others may sceptically allege, either that the Huarochiri borrowed their myths from the conquerors and inserted them in their native divine legends, or that the Spanish collector, like the Ettrick Shepherd’s grandmother, was “aiblins an awfu’ leear”. My own sympathies are not with the sceptics.

Cases like this are very rare: the oldest voyagers seldom thought of collecting märchen; it is quite by chance that we learn from Herodotus how the Scythians had the tale of the fortunate youngest son. Nor does that help us much; people will say that the Scythians borrowed it from India, and though they cannot prove, we cannot disprove, the statement. We seem on safer ground with the Zulus. They have only been in contact with Europeans for little over a century, and they have seen more of our bayonets than of our story-tellers. Whence, then, their wealth of märchen analogous to our own, but most closely intertwined with their peculiar national usages? Could the borrowing and the acclimatising have been accomplished since the first English crew landed in Natal? For my own part I think not: I think, if the elements of the stories were borrowed, they drifted south from the great lakes, in the course of commerce and national wanderings. There is no certainty, but an experiment might be tried. A missionary might tell his black flock tales out of Grimm, and, by careful watching, might learn how rapidly and to what extent they are modified into conformity with native usage. But here would be all the difference between intentional instruction, and the chance sowing of the seeds of story. There is also hope wherever we reach virgin soil. The natives of New Guinea can have learned, it might seem, but little of European märchen, yet their legends, of which Mr. Romilly has collected a few, are analogous to our own,