Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/133

 Rh turned to men,dead men resuscitated, human beings sleeping for centuries—these things never were on sea or land, and belief in them must be due to a state of mind which no longer exists among civilised folk—they are savage in origin. So far so good; so far we are all, or nearly all, agreed. But when the further question is asked—Does the modern existence of tales embodying these ideas necessarily involve the existence of those beliefs among the nations where the tales are now found?—here we reach a point where we must distinguish. To invent such stories au sérieux requires no doubt a belief in the ideas underlying them. But merely to take them and hand them on as stories when once invented, does not necessarily involve such an active belief in metamorphosis, totemism, and the rest. The stories cannot, therefore, be used as archaeological evidence of the beliefs in the countries where they are found, unless we can be certain that they originated there. In other words, the problem of diffusion is of prior urgency to that of origin.

Mr. Hartland does not think so. He does not consider it necessary to take into account the possibility of a story having been diffused from a single centre before discussing what it means. If stories are found alike, whether in adjacent or distant countries, it was the similarity of the human minds producing them that produced the similarity. Against this is the fact that adjacent countries do as a matter of fact have a larger common store of tales than distant ones. There are more tales in common between Denmark and Scotland, say, than between Scotland and Russia. Again, while single incidents may have arisen independently in different countries, the weaving of them into a connected story, with incident following incident in the same order, this cannot have happened casually, as Mr. Lang and Mr. Hartland would contend. And if they point to a few cases where such series of incidents—e.g., the Jason and Medea type—occur in widely remote districts where diffusion by borrowing seems impossible, I would turn the tables,