Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/41

 assumed fact, in nature. Such tales though wild, and based on misconception, are intelligible and coherent. We have already seen how far from coherent or intelligible is Sir George Cox's explanation of part of the Jason legend as nature-myth.

We promised that, after criticising Sir George Cox's theory of the Origin of Myths and Household Tales, we would examine his method of interpreting individual stories. Let us see how Mr. Müller, followed by Sir George, handles a tale with which we are all familiar. In Grimm's Frosch König (vol. i. Tale i.), a frog (who in Grimm turns out to be a disguised prince) is betrothed to a princess. "How came such a story," asks Mr. Max Müller, "ever to be invented? Human beings were, we may hope, at all times sufficiently enlightened to know that a marriage between a frog and the daughter of a Queen was absurd. . . . We may ascribe to our ancestors any amount of childlike simplicity, but we must take care not to degrade them to the rank of mere idiots."

Mr. Müller thus explains the frog who would a-wooing go. As our ancestors were not mere idiots, the frog story must have had a meaning which would now seem rational. In old times (Mr. Müller says) the sun had many names. "It can be shown that 'frog' was an ancient name for the sun." But though it can be shown, Mr. Müller never shows it. He observes "this feminine Bheki (frog) must at one time have been used as a name for the sun." But though he himself asks for "chapter and verse from the Veda," he gives us no verse and no chapter for his assertions (Chips, ii. 201, 247). His theory is that tales were told of the sun, under his frog name, that people forgot that the frog meant the sun, and that they ended by possessing an irrational tale about the frog going a-wooing.

The Frog-sun whose existence is established on this