Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/22

14 to human beings. Does the question of first-foot rest upon the colour of the hair or upon the sex of the person? I think, looking at all the examples I have been able to examine, that colour is really the older basis of the superstition, and, if so, ethnological considerations are doubtless the root of it. Again, if the eldest son of the deceased owner of bees appears in the earliest form of the death-telling ceremony, we have an interesting fragment of the primitive house-ritual of our ancestors, which might be extended into other subjects—as, for instance, where it is the house-father in Derbyshire who carried the sacred fire round homestead and fields: a fact not considered beneath the notice of Dugdale.

When, however, we come upon the worship of natural objects, when we can suggest ethnological elements in folk-lore, and when we can speak of the house-father, and can see that duties are imposed upon him by traditional custom, unknown to any rules of civilised society, we are in the presence of facts older than those of historic times. It is thus that folk-lore so frequently points back to the past before the age of history. Over and over again we pause before the facts of folk-lore, which, however explained, always lead us back to some unexplored epoch of history, some undated period, which has not revealed its heroes, but which has left us an heritage of its mental strivings. Some folk-lorists attach this unexplored, undated period to events which are crowded with specific figures anno domini, but I am not one of these. For I believe it to be by means of a scientific analysis of each individual item that the folk-lore of to-day is to be traced back to the early European peoples.

If this view is correct, the culture of these people, as it is revealed to us by the classical writers and the chroniclers, must fall into the series at some given point. In these writers, the early inhabitants of Britain are depicted among the rudest types of people, one of their most amiable practices being to eat the bodies of their deceased