Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/121

TRANSACTIONS OF THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY.

IX.] are some folktales, and these usually the greatest in the world, which are so familiar to us that we read them over and over again without pausing to consider their structure or peculiarities. They are like a London street, the Strand, for instance, down which some of us pass daily, without stopping to think of the successive stages of architecture which it exhibits, or of the historical associations which cluster round every corner. We are also too prone to think of these great productions of the imaginative genius of our race as mere inventions of the poet and nothing else. It seems almost an act of impiety to attempt to dissect such a work of art as the tale of the Wooing of Penelope ; but by treating such Sagas as mere romance we miss, I venture to think, most of their force and beauty. The Homeric poems did not spring to light all at once from chaos ; they did not appear to delight the world as Athene leaped from the brow of Zeus. Like all the other imaginative literature of the world, they were produced by a slow process of evolution and assimilation in the brain of the artist. He very seldom, perhaps never,