Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/298

284 of the interpretations put upon them proves that, at least, their elemental meaning is dim and uncertain, and makes it very dubious whether they ever had any such significance at all. It is not denied here that some of these myths and tales may have been suggested by elemental and meteorological phenomena. For example, when we find almost everywhere among European peasants, and among Samoyeds and Zulus, as in Greek heroic-myths of the Jason cycle, the story of the children who run away from a cannibal or murderous mother or stepmother, we are reminded of certain nature-myths. The stars are often said to be the children of the sun, and to flee away at dawn, lest he or their mother, the moon, should devour them. This early observation may have started the story of flight from the cannibal parents, and the legend may have been brought down from heaven to earth. Yet this were, perhaps, a far-fetched hypothesis of the origin of a tale which may readily have been born wherever human beings have a tendency (as in North America and South Africa) to revert to cannibalism.

The peculiarity, then, of the myths which we propose to call "Heroic and Romantic Tales" (märchen, contes populaires), is the absence, as a rule, of any obvious explanatory purpose. They are romances or novels, and if they do explain anything, it is rather the