Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/273

 Rh by reason of this capacity of the living folk-tale to reflect the daily life of man. I refer to the Buddhist Jātakas and the Gesta Romanorum. Different as they are in many respects, these two great gatherings are alike in the fact that they are composed of floating tales which lent themselves readily to allegorization by the preachers of a new creed. The Buddhist birth-tales are just the popular stories of the East without any alteration save the addition of the tag that the hero is Buddha in some former life, and that, for doing thus and thus, such and such things afterwards happened to him in another birth. In the Gesta, stories of the most Rabelaisian sort are retold with a calm disregard of propriety, and then moralised with " Carissimi, this signifies the " soul, or the heart, or whatsoever else may have seemed good to the holy fathers. In each case, it is the faithfulness with which the stories reflected oriental or mediæval life that rendered them so suitable for theological allegorization.

But, though these great collections give us an idea of the value of a folk-tale as one factor of social life, we shall perhaps gain a clearer view of the folk-tale as the natural expression of village opinion by analysing a single sample. I will take No. 258 of Wolf's Hessische Sagen:

There were once too many storks in Griesheim, and the moot accordingly directed the village servant to drive them away with a stick wherever they showed themselves. But the villagers soon complained that their crops of corn, rape, and hemp were being destroyed, and the moot met again to consider how the storks might be driven away without the servant's treading down the fields to get at them. They deliberated long, till one cried at last, "I have it." He had a ladder brought, and stood the servant on it, while twelve men carried the ladder whither he would. Thus the servant trod down no more com. But, while he was driving away the storks in front, one came and sat on the ladder behind as if to scorn him. Whereupon the bailiff, who held it his bounden duty to care for the welfare of the villagers, got himself mounted on another ladder carried by a second dozen of men. In this way they drove away the storks, and, though the fields were entirely trodden down by the people, they had the satisfaction of showing the storks that villagers are not to be treated with contempt.