Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/157

Rh underlie the Saga of the Wooing of Penelope. I do not fear that any member of this Society will accuse me of impiety in thus attempting to dissect one of the noblest pieces of romantic literature. This method does, I believe, enable us in a useful way to realise the place which the poems of Homer occupy in the development of folk-tradition. It tends to corroborate the conclusion which can be reached by other roads that they mark a comparatively recent stage, and that a vast space of time lies between them and the beginnings of the great folktale cycles, to which, as I conceive, they were so largely indebted. This is exactly what is suggested by the archaeological evidence. Homer habitually and wisely utilises old material. Sometimes, if we may venture to say so, he almost deliberately modifies the old stories and rites to adapt them to the taste or knowledge of his age, or to enhance the dramatic interest of his narrative. In the process some of them have become so changed as to be almost unrecognisable, but the gain is ours in the dignity, interest, and pathos which his treatment of them adds to his subject. Folklore has thus, I conceive, its place, though it may be an humble one, beside philology, archaeology, and literary criticism in contributing to the discussion of the tangled problem of the origin and development of this great body of poetic imagination. If in some cases it may be said that we are tempted to overstate the evidence, and to read between the lines of the poems more than they really contain, this is only to say that a method of enquiry may, in the main, be sound, though some of the incidental suggestions with which it is accompanied may not stand the test of criticism.