Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/22

 is not quite run out, and, before it comes to an end, the mother of the goats unrips the wolf's stomach, and places stones in it in place of the little goats who come trooping out, as the days of the week begin again to run their course."

This explanation rests on the one obviously modern feature of the story. If the explanation is correct, the state of mind in which Night could be conceived of as a wolf, and as capable of being slit open, loaded with stones, and sewn up again, must have lasted and remained intelligible, till the quite recent invention of clock-cases. The clock-case was then intelligently introduced into the legend. This seems hard to believe, though Mr. Tylor writes (Primitive Culture, i. 341) thus, "We can hardly doubt there is a quaint touch of sun-myth in a tale which took its present shape since the invention of clocks."

Surely a clock-case might seem (as to M. Boisgobey's hero, and to the lady freemason in the old story, it did seem) a good hiding-place, even to a mind not occupied at all with the sun. What makes the whole interpretation the more dubious is, that while with Sir George Cox the Wolf is the Night, with M. Husson (in the similar tale of the swallowing of Red Riding Hood) the Wolf is the Sun. And this is proved by the peculiar brilliance of the wolf's fur, a brilliance recognised by Sir G. Cox when he wants the sun to be a wolf.

On the whole, then, the student of märchen must avoid two common errors. He must not regard modern interpolations as part of the mythical essence of a story. He must not hurry to explain every incident as a reference to the natural phenomena of Dawn, Sunset, Wind, Storm, and the like. The points which are so commonly interpreted thus, are sometimes modern interpolations; more frequently they are relics of ancient customs of which the mythologist never heard, or survivals from an archaic mental condition