Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/432

 424 which became civilised, the necessary alteration in the storyis not beyond the possibihty of change. Further, in some tales, as in Santhal and Kaffir, not to mention others from Europe, in Miss Roalfe Cox's book, we have Cinderellus, not Cinderella, a boy, not a girl. On the whole, then, Mr. Jacobs' argument that Cinderella "cannot have arisen in a savage stage of society" seems inconclusive, as far as it is based on a belief that savages have little distinction of rank. As to shoes, again, the tale could get on without shoes, and the differences of rank exist in great force, in some shoeless societies. It would not be the tale "as we have it" without the shoe, but what proves that the tale as we have it (in which version?) is the original form? We have shown that, even in the tale as we have it, there are different degrees of barbarism. But we should remember that as the incident of the ewe mother, in Mr. McLeod's version, may be the freak, or the confusion, of a modern narrator, it were unwise to lay much stress on it.

If we attempt to get back to the original tale, we are lost. Take the Santhal and Kaffir varieties. These may be very remote from our time, may be comparatively near the beginning; or they may be very much depraved from the central, the prevalent type of the tale. Here I must "hedge", I do not know which alternative is right. But, if these forms are comparatively near the beginning, then those forms are in a nebulous undecided state. We can hardly say whether the tale is more akin to Cinderella, or to The Black Bull d Norroway. It looks as if it might develop either way, and there is much of The Black Bull in some Scandinavian variants of Cinderella. Were I to hazard a hypothesis, it would be that the story was, originally, thus nebulous and indeterminate. It might take many forms, the hero or heroine might follow many of the diverging paths in the forest of romance. But at some time, somewhere, the prevalent type was hit upon, and, being the fittest, it survived and spread, remaining more savage among the Celts and people of the Levant, becoming more domestic