Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/81

 Rh becomes a capricious or faithless woman. Such a process would be facilitated and hastened by the fusion of the two story-types postulated above; what in either was equivocal in the character of the heroine would put on a darker aspect. The process affects the machinery of the tale as well as the attitude of the narrator; it facilitates the change by which, following the lines of another group of tales, the transformation of the werwolf is ascribed to inimicably exercised magic instead of to a congenital attribute; its extreme development is reached in, partly remodelled as this is by the clerkly Latin translator upon the lines of the Eastern stories of woman's faithlessness so well represented in the Seven Sages cycle. It is noteworthy that the current folktale, whilst exhibiting the altered machinery, which indeed it still further alters and complicates, does not go to anything like the same length in the change of moral attitude. The popular tale retains a blurred but unmistakable kinship of sentiment with the old mythic romance.

I have only given the broad outlines of Professor Kittredge's admirable study; the reader must be referred to the original for the numerous detail pieces of investigation concerning special story-types and incidents, their action and interaction, the rationale of story-change, which make his work fascinating reading for the storyologist. Space fails me for further comment or criticism, but I may be allowed to emphasise two of his conclusions. He points out that has been preserved by a mere accident; were it unknown the use of "in elucidating the history of documents so venerable as the Breton lais" would certainly be criticised; "what, use a modern folktale?" it would be said, "how uncritical!" Yet the preservation of the Latin-Welsh tale does not make our use of the current folktale right, it only enables us to prove that it is right. The second conclusion I would state in Professor Kittredge's own words: "The specific results of our study are to emphasise the importance of Irish material, and even of 'modern Irish' folklore in settling these questions" (i.e., the influence of Celtic upon mediæval romance).

Having steadfastly championed these views ever since my first work for the Folk-Lore Society, now near a quarter of a century old, I may be permitted some satisfaction in finding them so ably urged by the distinguished scholar upon whom has fallen the mantle of Francis James Child.