Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/144

136 it must have been “contaminated” by the introduction of the series of incidents derived from the tale now represented by the Grimms’ “One eye, two eyes, and three eyes”; in other words, at the time this happened, “One eye, two eyes, and three eyes” had become a convention of the folk-tale.

I will grant at once that it is possible that when “One eye, two eyes, and three eyes” was composed there was still surviving a belief in animal ancestry, but I see no reason for holding, as Mr. Nutt seems to hold, that this belief survived along with the story so long as it was told, which would imply that it survives in Germany in the present century; and still less do I believe that the belief survives in those countries where the story was introduced, because it might well be thought the story became popular, not because of the familiarity of the ideas contained in it, but rather because of their strangeness. Mr. Nutt thinks that he has made a point against me by stating my position in the following terms: “Fairy tales are not really old, but are stuffed full of imitations of old fairy tales which have disappeared,” and he repeats the well-worn witticism about Shakespeare being written by another fellow of the same name, whereas a truer statement of my case would be that Shakespeare’s words existed before his time, but not his works. If, however, he would only kindly add to his statement, “or have been imported from other countries,” it would be a not infelicitous statement of part of my position; it does more, it leads up to another part of my views to which I would draw attention, I believe for the first time, and that is the theory of the “survival of the fittest” in folk-tales.

The rigid Anthropological School of folk-tale research have had the merit of drawing our attention to savage custom, as explaining the unnatural incidents of folk-tales. Mr. Farrer went somewhat further, and drew attention to savage fairy tales themselves. Since his time several sets of savage tales have been published, especially in