Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/318

 294 Notes on Orendel and other Stories.

voyage, it is argued, is not the authentic story. It is made up out of ready-made stuff. The cloggy water, the Leber- mere, for example, is a " machine," and a favourite one, in the popular romances and in popular literature generally ; ^ and Ise the fisherman is found in the German poem of St. Oswald.

Thus, on one side there is a theory which makes a German Odyssey out of the old book — a story that is not told in the book as it stands. On the other side is a criticism of the work which attaches no importance to the things taken up by the first party, and considers that the positive substantial groundwork is that legendary interest which the first party would neglect as adventitious. Both sides — the mythologists, who would like to see Orendel restored to his own as a demigod at least, identified with Aurvendill ; and also the more positive critic, who takes what is before him, and does not choose to say " return of Ulysses " where the book says " outward bound " — are agreed in making little of the story as it is given in the first part of the poem, the part described above ; the one side because it is not what they wish to find, the other because it seems to them poor stuff and mere mechanical invention and composition.

Thus this ancient piece of hack-work may serve as an illustration of different methods and tempers of criticism. Poor enough in itself, it is a pretty subject for the game.

It raises some rather large problems, which are likely to recur wherever literature touches, as it perpetually must, on the ground of mythology or folklore.

When the same plot is found in different stories, in what sense is it the same ? The question has been heard before

unerkannt, unci erst nachdem cr sich Land und Leute zuriickgewonnen, dcr (Ratlin Trcue vviederholt erprobt und diesc ihm sogar im Kampfe siegreich beigestanden, gibt er sich als Herr und Konig zu crkennen, und die Mannen huldigon ihm. (Berger, C;-t?;/(^/t'/ (l8S8), p. Ixxi.)

' Herzog Ernst, ed. Karl Bartsch, p. cxlv. (Berger's reference).