Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/49

 INTRODUCTION.

ORIGIN.

HE most careless reader can hardly fail to see that many of the Tales in this volume have the same ground-work as those with which he has been familiar from his earliest youth. They are Nursery Tales, in fact, of the days when there were tales in nurseries—old wives' fables, which have faded away before the light of gas and the power of steam. It is long, indeed, since English nurses told these tales to English children by force of memory and word of mouth. In a written shape, we have long had some of them at least in English versions of the Contes de ma Mère l'Oye of Perrault, and the Contes de Fées of Madame D'Aulnoy; those tight-laced, high-heeled tales of the "teacup times" of Louis XIV. and his successors, in which the popular tale appears to as much disadvantage as an artless country girl in the stifling atmosphere of a London theatre. From these foreign sources, after the voice of the English reciter was hushed—and it was hushed in England more than a century ago—our great-grandmothers learnt to tell of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, of Little Red Riding-Hood and Blue Beard, mingled together in the Cabinet des Fées with Sindbad the Sailor and Aladdin's wondrous lamp; for that was an uncritical age, and its spirit breathed hot and cold, east and west, from all quarters of the globe at once,