Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/17

 in the romance of Berthe aux grans piés. The successful younger son was known to the Scythians. Peau d'Ane became a saint of the Irish Church, and the "supplanted bride" developed into St. Tryphine. The smith who made hell too hot for him is Sisyphus in Greek. The bride mysteriously severed from her lord in fairy tales, is Urvasi in the Rig Veda. Thus it is clear that there is some connection, however it is to be explained, between Aryan household tales and the higher Aryan mythology. The same plots and incidents are common to both myth and märchen.

These three sets of obvious facts introduce us to the three-fold problem of "storyology," of the science of nursery tales.

The first discovery—that these tales among the most widely severed Aryan peoples are the same in plot and incident —leads us to inquire into the cause of this community of fable. How are we to explain the Diffusion of Household Tales?

The second feature we observed, namely, the crazy "irrational," monstrous character of the incidents leads us to ask, how did such incidents ever come to be invented, and almost exclusively selected for the purpose of popular fiction? What, in fact, is the Origin of Household Tales?

The third observation we made on the resemblances between household tales and Greek and Vedic myths, and mediæval romances, compels us to examine into the Relations between märchen and the higher mythologies.

Taking these three topics in their order, we must first look at what can be said as to the diffusion of Household Tales, Why do people so far apart, so long severed by space, and so widely different in language as Russians and Celtic Highlanders, for example, possess the same household stories? There are three, or perhaps we should say four, possible explanations. There is the theory of conscious