Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/304

290 collected the stones of Hesse. The Grimms became aware that the stories were common to the peasant class in most European lands, and that they were also known in India and the East. As they went on collecting, they learned that African and North American tribes also had their märchen, not differing greatly in character from the stories familiar to German firesides.

Already Sir Walter Scott had observed, in a note to the Lady of the Lake, that "a work of great interest might be compiled upon the origin of popular fiction, and the transmission of similar tales from age to age, and from country to country. The mythology of one period would then appear to pass into the romance of the next, and that into the nursery tales of subsequent ages." This opinion has long been almost universal. Thus, if the story of Jason is found in Greek myths, and also, with a difference, in popular modern märchen, the notion has been that the märchen is the last and youngest form, the detritus of the myth. Now, as the myth is only known from literary sources (Homer, Mimnermus, Apollonius Rhodius, Euripides, and so on), it must follow, on this theory, that the people had borrowed from the literature of the more cultivated classes. As a matter of fact, literature has borrowed far more from the people than the people have borrowed from literature, though both processes have been at work in the course of history. But the question of the relations of märchen to myths, and of both to romance, may be left unanswered for the moment. More pressing questions are, what is the