Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/248

 222 already long before, its original meaning and has now become a mere skeleton, a shadow of what once was a picture saturated with rich colouring.

If my view is correct, and historical investigation seems to favour it, we shall easily understand why some of the fairy and other popular tales appear either meaningless or downright cruel and barbarous. The prince has been transformed by the wizard of the West, into the uncanny shapeless dog. A charm has been thrown upon him, which no one, if not this Society, will be able to break. The spell will, however, not be broken, if we start upon the wrong track. The comparison which has hitherto been made at random must give way to a certain system. The similarity between certain general points and the eclecticism in the comparison of incidents, which lies at the root of many far-fetched conclusions of modern researches based upon them, is to my mind fallacious. We dare not follow in our study the same flight of fancy, which delights us in the fairytale, or we shall never leave dreamland or Cockayne.

I always pre-suppose that we start from the assumption of migration, that tales wandered from land to land. In our research, I would try in the first place to follow geographically in the wake of that journey. Now, it is a remarkable fact that the tales of adjoining countries show much closer similarity to one another, than with those collected in a distant land. Even in cases of totally different races, and some of quite recent origin, but all now living in that neighbourhood, such as Turks and Greeks and Albanians, this similarity is startling. How this could be explained on the anthropological tack, or on any other, except on that of mutual borrowing, passes the wit of man. I am prepared to hear ingenious attempts to explain it away, but facts have a peculiar obstinacy; they will not be altered by any doctoring or hectoring. If, as I believe, the ancient Byzantine Empire formed the bridge between