Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/69

 gifted beasts. The incident of the expedition, the companions, and the quest in general, recurs in the Kalewala, the national poem of the Finns. When Jason with his company arrive in Colchis, we enter on a set of incidents perhaps more widely diffused than any others in the whole of folk-lore. Briefly speaking, the situation is this: an adventurer comes to the home of a powerful and malevolent being. He either is the brother of the wife of this being, or he becomes the lover of his daughter. In the latter case, the daughter helps the adventurer to accomplish the impossible tasks set him by her father. Afterwards the pair escape, throwing behind them, in their flight, various objects which detain the pursuer. When the adventurer is the brother of the wife of the malevolent being, the story usually introduces the "fee fo, fum" formula,—the husband smells the flesh of the stranger. In this variant, tasks are not usually set to the brother as they are to the lover. The incidents of the flight are much the same everywhere, even when, as in the Japanese and Lithuanian myths a brother is fleeing from the demon-ghost of his sister in Hades, or when, as in the Samoyed tale, two sisters are evading the pursuit of a cannibal step-mother. The fugitives always throw small objects behind them, such as a comb, which magically turns into a forest, and so forth.

We have already alluded to the wide diffusion of these incidents, which recur, in an epic and humanised form, in the Jason myth. By way of tracing the incidents from their least civilised to their Greek shape, we may begin with the Nama version. It is a pretty general rule that in the myths of the lower races, animals fill the rôles which, in civilised story, are taken by human beings. In Bleek's Hottentot Fables and Tales, p. 60, the incidents turn on the visit of brothers to a sister, not on the coming of an adventurous lover. The sister has