Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/270

 234 Correspondence.

traces of the pristine cuckoo nature. When it is recalled that among the other Aryan forms are such early recorded ones as the Hellenic Perseus, the Italic Romulus, and the Iranian Cyrus, the force of the objection is manifest. Furthermore, the father and son combat is a standing part of the Expulsion and Return formula. But this theme, as Dr. Potter has shown in Sohrab and Rustem, is of almost world-wide occurrence. Can it be seriously maintained that it has its origin in reflection suggested by the domestic, or rather non-domestic, arrangements of the cuckoo.

My initial and fundamental objection is psychological. The sagas discussed were the cherished possession of the foremost races of mankind, of the races which have developed the whole of modern culture, to whom every advance in thought and art is due. At a certain stage of their development these races associated this saga with their wisest and mightiest chief, with their pre- eminent champion, with their eponymous hero. I assert that the elements of the saga, elements purely mythical, must be referable to a section of the mythology which had a vital, a predominant, interest for these races. I am quite willing to admit that the cuckoo may have possessed a mythical significance. I protest that it can only be a secondary one at the best, and that among no people can the cuckoo have played such a part as could by any possibility whatever have enabled stories connected with it to have developed into a heroic saga of the first rank. This is not the case with explanations derived either from ' solar ' or from ' Life-persistence and Increase ' mythology. Both have demon- strably given rise to considerable mythical systems with corre- sponding ritual ; both are capable^ by their extension in the mythopoeic age, by their cultural import, of furnishing a soil in which subsequent heroic saga could flourish. If ever a cuckoo mythology existed, — and Dr. Pokorny should first have demon- strated this, — it must, in the nature of things, have been incapable of doing what he claims.

Numerous other objections will occur to everyone : it is the female cuckoo which lays the egg in the alien nest, and one expects a cuckoo saga to develop on matriarchal lines ; the re- proachful use of the term cuckoo is of course ironic, — the names of the arch-deceiver being applied par antiphrase to the deceived