Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/321

 Rh interests are already well cared for by active and capable workers. But the Society should, I maintain, look upon the other seven classes as its province. If mine, or any equally far-reaching definition, be adopted, an authoritative statement to that effect should be made, and the Society should press upon all Members the importance of only using the term in the sense stated, and should insist upon their doing so in all communications addressed to the Journal.

If my definition be good, it is, of course, absurd to speak of folklore and comparative mythology as being synonymous. At the most it can be urged that folk-belief and comparative mythology touch each other at a great many points, a fact which by no means necessitates the confounding together of the two studies. The relation between them may be stated thus: all, or nearly all, the facts of comparative mythology are to be found in folk-belief in solution; a great many facts of folk-belief are to be found in comparative mythology crystallised. The facts are essentially the same in both cases, but the one study deals with them at one, the other at another stage. It is when they have become at once rigid and systematised by passing through the hands of an hierarchical class, yet capable of development by falling under the artistic influence of the craftsman and the philosophic influence of the thinker, that comparative mythology has to do with them; before then they are but a portion of folk-belief. The two studies thus go hand-in-hand, and cannot be carried on at all without perpetual reference from one to the other.

With respect to terminology, I do not think I can do better than reprint the following notes, originally printed for use of Members of the Folk-Tale Committee alone:—

"There is no exact English equivalent for the German word Sage; neither 'myth' nor 'tradition' conveys the full meaning. Sage enters in German into a number of compound words, such as Sagform, a term which comprehends every species of mythic expression; Sagwissenschaft, for which we only have in English the clumsy 'comparative mythology' or 'storyology,' neither of which is adequate; Sagzug, which takes in the idea of our 'incident,' and a great deal more, as it denotes not only separate parts of the action but also the pictorial features, e.g., the hammer of Thor is a Sagzug, just as much as his