Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/123

Rh occasionally too, I venture to think, we meet with cases in which it would seem that the poet imperfectly realised the conditions of the age with which he was dealing. In other words, the gulf was so great between the poet and his materials that he becomes obscure when he attempts to adjust the archaic elements of the tradition to the time in which he lived. But we must not expect too much from this method of treating the poems from the point of view of anthropology and folklore. It would be a result of no little importance if by this mode of enquiry we found an additional test for ascertaining the original structure of the Epics, and for fixing their relative age and the sources from which the materials of them were collected. That such a stratification of custom and folk-tradition will some day be traced in them I am quite certain. But our danger at present is lest we should read too much between the lines of the poems from the results of comparative anthropology. Some of us are perhaps too fond of trying to see a totem in every bush ; and we must be cautious lest we try to discover more survivals of savagery in the Iliad and Odyssey than can fairly be shown to exist. I need hardly say that the folktales included in the Epics fall into two well-marked divisions — one that of native growth, or of the Aryan cycle, if we choose to adopt a title not very clearly defined, which appears generally in the Iliad and in the Odyssey in the tale of the Return and the Wooing ; the other meeting us in the poems outside the Hellenic area, which is probably of Phœnician origin, such as the Sagas of the Phæacians, the Sirens, Minos and so on, of which the Odyssey is full. At the same time, this geographical distribution of the Sagas must not be pressed too closely. One tale, for instance, that of the Cyclops, or the Baffled Giant, has numerous analogues in what we usually call Aryan tradition. These latter we need not consider now, but proceed to the Saga of the Wooing.