Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/26

 As man thought of all things as living, so he spoke of them all as living. He could not get over the idea that any day living clouds might spring lip and choke the living sun, while he had the most unaffected sympathy with the living dawn and the living dew. "In these spontaneous utterances of thoughts awakened by outward phenomena, we have the source of the myths which must be regarded as primary" (Myth. Ar. i. 42). In all this period, "there was no bound or limit to the images, suggested by the sun in his ever varying aspects." Man, apparently, was almost absorbed in his interest in the sun, and in speculations about the dew, the cloud, the dawn.

We now approach another influence on mythology, the influence of language. While man was in the conditions of mind already described by Sir George Cox, he would use "a thousand phrases to describe the actions of the beneficent or consuming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious wind, and every word or phrase became the germ of a new story, as soon as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name." Now the mind was always losing its hold on the original force of the name, and the result would be a constant metamorphosis of the remark made about a natural phenomenon, into a myth about something denoted by a term which had ceased to possess any meaning. These myths, caused by forgetfulness of the meaning of words (as we understand our author), were of the secondary class, and a third class came into existence through folk-etymologies, as they are called, popular guesses at the derivations of words. We have now briefly stated Sir George Cox's theory of the origins of myths, and of the mental condition and habits through which myths were evolved. But how does this theory explain the origin of Household Tales?

This question ought to lead us to our third problem, what are the relations of Household Tales to the higher