Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/249

 Rh the products of East and West, and the Frankish Empire to have been one of the means of bringing Byzantine lore near to the Atlantic, the route which the tales have taken will be perfectly clear.

In order to determine whether any given tale has retained its primitive form, or has been modified in its transmission, I would then examine the tale as to its religious character. As I have already indicated, I use these words in the broadest possible meaning. I would look for the amount of belief and things believed in contained in the tale; and the greater the prominence which is given to it, the more ancient would I consider that tale. It must contain a certain moral or ethical point, if it is not merely a joke, or the tale of simple clever feats, such as the clever thief (Rhampsinit). Beast tales pure and simple are another class of similar tales which have lost their original meaning, and have turned either to satires of existing circumstances (Reynard), or pure and simple tales of animals, although endowed with human faculties.

It would lead me too far astray to follow this question up here, although it stands in close connection with my views as to the easterly home and the route which the migration of tales took, Byzantium can be shown in this case also as the connecting link.

If these views of the religious (ethical) character of the tale be true, and also the criterion for the classification of tales in a chronological and geographical order, guided by the retention of that feature or by its disappearance, these views must be borne out by literary investigation. The older a tale is, the more prominent must be this character, and the more recent the tale is, the more bare and bald. If we then compare the versions that have come down to us in a written form with their oral counterpart, the same difference would have to be found, viz.: that the older MS. or printed version will contain more mythological or ethical (or didactical) elements, than the parallels in modern