Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/21

 The incident on which the revenge turns, the swallowing of the victims and their escape alive, though missing in the negro version, is of almost universal occurrence.

It is found in Australia, in Greece it has made its way into the legend of Cronus, in Brittany into the legend of Gargantua. Callaway's collection gives us Zulu examples: in America it is familiar to the Indians of the North, and to those of British Guiana. Grimm gives some German variants in his note; Bleek's Bushman Folklore contains several examples of the incident. The Mintiras of Malay have introduced the conception of swallowing and disgorging alive into a myth, which explains the movements of sun, moon, and stars. (Tylor's Primitive Culture, i. 338, 356).

In the tale of the Wolf and the Seven Kids, then, the essence is found in the tricks whereby the wolf deceives his victims; in the victory of the goat, in the disgorging of the kids alive, and the punishment of the wolf (as of Cronus in Hesiod) by the stone which he is obliged to admit into his system. In these events there is nothing allegorical or mystical, no reference to sunrise or storms. The crude ideas and incidents are of world-wide range, and suit the fancy of the most backward barbarians. But what is clearly modern in Grimm's tale is the introduction of the clock-case. That, obviously, cannot be older than the common use of tall clocks. If, then, we interpret the tale by regarding the clock-case as its essential feature, surely we mistake a late and civilised accident for the essence of an ancient and barbarous legend. Sir G. W. Cox lays much stress (Aryan Mythology, i. 358) on the affair of the clock-case. "The wolf," he says, "is here the Night, or the Darkness, which tries to swallow up the seven days of the week, and actually swallows six. The seventh, the youngest, escapes by hiding herself in the clock-case; in other words, the week