Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/279

 Rh to me, points out that he has likewise guarded himself from any assertion of the exclusive Indian origin of folk-tales. I am quite prepared to admit the possibility of India borrowing from Europe, and the locale and character of the three Indian variants (Nos. 25, 235, 307) are sufficient to show the probability of such borrowing in the case of Cinderella. Miss Frere's collection was mainly from an ayah from Goa, whose family had been Christian for several generations; Salsette has long been open to European influence, and so has Bombay.

With regard, however, to the important methodological problem which I have placed second above, Miss Cox's collection has much instruction to give. The very fact that in its inception Cinderella, as we now have it, cannot have arisen in a savage stage of society, renders it certain that the "savage" elements in certain forms of it—animal parentage, dead-mother aid, bones together, and the like—may have been introduced into the story after it had obtained currency, or, if in the original form, may have been introduced as conventional episodes of the folk-tale which had a far more remote origin. The archaeological value of such incidents is accordingly much reduced by such considerations.

One thing, however, comes out quite clearly from Miss Cox's labours, and as it is a thing on which I have insisted throughout my own folk-tale studies, I am naturally jubilant over the result. Here we have 133 variants of type A—the Cinderella type pure and simple—scattered over all the lands of civilisation. Yet no one, I take it, would be prepared to contend that any single one of these was independently created, and was without relationship, cognate or agnate, to any one of the rest. The Borrowing Theory of explaining the similarities in folk-tale plots comes out triumphant as the sole working hypothesis that will explain the same story existing in so many lands. That in this particular case the borrowing is not from India does not affect the general question.