Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/18

 borrowing. The Celts, it might be averred, read Russian folk tales and acclimatised them. The French took their ideas from the modern Greeks. This hypothesis, thus nakedly stated, may be at once dismissed. The peasant class, which is the guardian of the ancient store of legends, reads little, and travels scarcely at all. Allied to the theory of borrowing, but not manifestly absurd, is the theory of slow transmission. We may be as convinced as Sir George Cox (Aryan Mythology, vol. i. 109), that the Aryan peoples did not borrow consciously from each other. We may agree with Mr. Max Müller that "nursery tales are generally the last things to be borrowed by one nation from another" (Chips, ii. 216). But we cannot deny that "in the dark backward and abysm of Time," in the unrecorded wanderings of Man, Household Tales may have drifted from race to race. In the shadowy distance of primitive commerce, amber and jade and slaves were carried half across the world by the old trade-routes and sacred ways. It is said that oriental jade is found in Swiss lake-dwellings, and that an African trade cowry has been discovered deep in a Cornish barrow. Folk tales might well be scattered abroad in the same manner by merchantmen gossiping over their Khan fires, by Sidonian mariners chatting in the sounding loggia of an Homeric house, by the slave dragged from his home and passed from owner to owner across Africa or Europe, by the wife who, according to primitive law, had to be chosen from an alien clan. Time past is very long, land has lain where the sea roars now; we know not how the ancestors of existing races may have met and mixed before Memphis was founded, or Babylon. Thus the hypothesis of the transmission of Household Tales cannot absolutely be set aside as in every case without possible foundation.

Before examining theories of the Diffusion and Origin of Household Tales, and of their relations to the higher