Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/168

 140 Ethnological Data in Folklore.

all the parts were closely interwoven and cannot be divorced from each other even for the purpose of a separate analysis. To have established that these fire customs are intimately connected with a tribal unit is to connect them with a tribal religion, and to limit their interpretation and meaning by what is conveyed by the term tribal.

They reveal the solemn rekindling of the tribal fire at least once a year, and the carrying of the sacred flame therefrom to the fire of the household, as the two essential details of the cult ; and the several very significant rites which accompany these details are all illustrative of the tribal conditions to which the whole ceremonial belongs.

Thus the scattered remnants of fire-customs which appear in our folklore can be restored by this method as a part of the early tribal system of organisation — a system be it re- membered which governed every detail of early life, political, religious, and social, and which has left its marks on the map of Britain and on the early constitutional history of our people. The importance of this conclusion is that it enables us to proceed from the identification of tribal custom and belief to the identification of tribes : from the identifica- tion of tribes to the identification of races.

Here I suggest is scientific evidence of ethnological

' elements in folklore. We have arrived at the tribe as

a social and political organisation, and this tribe can be

y identified in a way that individual custom or belief cannot.

'_As a matter of fact, the tribe as made known to us through

the fire-customs of modern Britain is identical with the

tribe as made known to us by ancient records and by

modern examples. It is an Aryan tribe, belonging to all

branches of the Aryan-speaking people, and I conclude

therefore that this group of fire-customs is Aryan. Here

at all events is ethnological value.

But we can proceed further. There are a few scattered fire-customs distinctly opposed to the customs which are capable of being pieced together into tribal customs. What