Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/204

 196 enchanted castle and the successful youngest brother. The latter trait is of course one of the most frequent of folk-tale formulæ; I have drawn out a list extending to some hundreds of tales in which the youngest son or daughter is successful after the elder ones had failed, but I am convinced that the choice of the youngest son as a hero is due to artistic, not archæological causes. But there is one contribution that the science of the folk-tale may make to the problem of antiquity which we have been hitherto discussing, and that is by directing our first attention to the form of "Childe Rowland".

This begins with verse, then turns to prose, and throughout drops again at intervals into poetry in a friendly way, like Mr. Wegg. Now this is a form of writing not unknown in other branches of literature, the cante-fable, of which "Aucassin et Nicolette" is the most distinguished example. Nor is the cante-fable confined to France. Many of the heroic verses of the Arabs contained in the Hamâsa would be unintelligible without accompanying narrative, which is nowadays preserved in the commentary. The verses imbedded in the Arabian Nights give them something of the character of a cante-fable, and the same may be said of the Indian and Persian story-books, though the verse is usually of a sententious and moral kind, as in the gâthas of the Buddhist Jatakas. The contemporary Hindoo storytellers, Mr. Hartland remarks, also commingle verse and prose. Even as remote as Zanzibar, Mr. Lang notes, the folk-tales are told as cante-fables. There are even traces in the Old Testament of such screeds of verse amid the prose narrative, as in the story of Lamech or that of Balaam. All this suggests that this is a very early and common form of narrative.

Among folk-tales there are still many traces of the cante-fable. Thus, in Grimm's collection, verses occur in Nos. 1, 5, 11, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21, 24, 28, 30, 36, 38a, b, 39a, 40, 45, 46, 47, out of the first fifty tales, 36 per cent. Of Chambers' twenty-one folk-tales, in the Popular Rhymes of