Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/42

 scanty testimony, is a great favourite with Sir George Cox, and occurs no fewer than seven times in his Mythology of the Aryan Peoples. Nay, this frog is made to explain the presence of many of the wonderful talking animals in Myth and Household Tale. "The frog prince or princess is only one of the thousand personifications of names denoting originally the phenomena of day and night. As carrying the morning light from the east to the west the sun is the Bull bearing Eurôpê from the purple land (Phoinikia), and the same changes which converted the Seven Shiners into the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, or the 'Seven Sages' (of Greece?), or the Seven Champions of Christendom, or the Seven Bears, transformed the sun into a wolf, a bear, a lion, a swan." (Ar. Myth. i. 105.)

Here we have the old use of analogies. Because of a theory (probably incorrect) that the Seven Bears of Indian stellar myth were originally seven shiners, all sorts of people in sets of seven twinkle off as "shiners" also, stellar or solar shiners. In the same way the theory of the sun-frog (without chapter or verse as it is) proves that all animals in Household Tales are the sun.

As the appearance of beasts with human qualities and accomplishments is one of the most remarkable features of Household Tales, we may look at another statement of Sir George Cox's views on this subject. Metamorphosis of men into animals and of animals into men is as common in Household Tales as a sprained ankle is in modern novels. Sir George Dasent (Popular Tales, p. cxix) pointed out that the belief in such metamorphoses "is primeval, and the traditions of every race tell of such transformations." Sir George Cox takes one of Sir George Dasent's numerous examples, and remarks "if this be an illustration, it accounts for all such