Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/250

 224 which have undergone that change of shedding the skin.

Here our real difficulties commence. Old collections of fairy or other tales are extremely scarce. Eg>'pt, with but one or two exceptions, leaves us thus far in the lurch; and Indian old fairy tales are distinctly different from European.

The literary tradition stops short at the twelfth century. I am speaking of Europe at large, and that part of it which stands under Latin influence. Classical antiquity lay buried under the ruins of Rome. From India and Egypt it is a far cry to those countries and to that epoch where and when the first "Exempla" appear and Syntipas, Bidpai and Barlaam have not yet obtained European citizenship. The bridge over that gap from East to West, and from antique to modern life, is formed undoubtedly by the Rome of the East—by the Greek Empire, which held sway for centuries over Asia Minor as well as over North Africa and the South of Europe, up to Venice; in fact, over all the countries of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean waters. This political unity helped the free intercourse between East and West. Life in Byzantium is half oriental under Phokas, Chalkokondylas, and the Comnenes; and there is the place where a poem such as that of Digenis Akritas could have been written, and as early as the tenth century. It reminds one both of the Shahnameh of Firdusi and of the epical cycles of Charlemagne and Arthur in France and England. The intercourse between various nations was possible only there; and for that very reason I hold that the folklore of the Balkan peninsula has retained more of its ancient colour than any other folklore of Europe.

What we want is to find ancient literary parallels, at any rate some centuries old, and to compare them with their modern parallels. If my conjectures are right, then the old texts will resemble more closely the versions collected in the ancient Byzantine Empire and will be more remote from the