Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/136

 1 24 Correspondence.

repeated.'* He adds with Socratic modesty that this may be due to his ignorance of folk-tales, but the presumption against its diffusion elsewhere is strong. At the least it cannot be common or popular. In this instance, therefore, the conditions of establish- ing the case for survival appear to be fulfilled. In essentials the ancient and modern versions correspond, and the episode appears not to occur outside the area in which it does occur both in ancient and in modern times. If subsequently it is found to occur outside this area, further investigation will be necessary to determine the mutual relations between the ancient and modern Greek versions and the terthnn quid. But until then we may safely assume that it is a survival in the direct line from ancient Greek tradition.

It is perhaps worth noticing in conclusion the divergencies in the modern and ancient versions and the changes which the story has suffered at the hands of time and circumstance. The ancient version belongs to what we may call the folk-tale stratum of the Greek epic, which deals with the wanderings of a hero who is at perpetual enmity with the god of the sea. The details of the episode have a particular point. Odysseus is under a spell to wander until he worships the god of the sea in a land where men are ignorant of the sea itself. With the mistake of thinking his oar a "chaff destroyer" Miss Harrison has dealt in her paper on "Mystica Vannus Licchi."^ She has there given an illustration of the modern Cretan 6vpvdi<c, a winnowing instrument which may be described roughly as a shovel with prongs. Odysseus' oar, as it appears for instance on a well-known gem,^ is much like a shovel without prongs. The mistake was easy. But, further, the word OvpvaKL is a modern form of the ancient Greek dplva^, a trident. With the trident we come back to Poseidon, whose symbol and instrument it was particularly supposed to be. It is just possible that some feeling of appropriateness in the similarity of a winnowing shovel and a trident helped to fix the detail of the story of the mistake.

is a survival from classical tradition.
 * M. Cosquin is, of course, not responsible for my opinion that the episode

^ The Jownal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xxiii., pp. 301-5.

8 It is probably most readily accessible in the reproduction in Monro, Homer'' s Odyssey, Books xiii.-xxiv., p. 260.