Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/167

Rh instructs it in the simple learning of the folk. In the very number of the Journal which contains Mr. Stuart-Glennie's paper we have Mr. C. Staniland Wake arguing (p. 65) that the great majority of Folk-tales were composed for educational purposes by sages who knew the power of "truth embodied in a tale." And, again, at p. 96, we find the reviewer of the Rev. J. H. Knowles's Dictionary of Kashmiri Proverbs saying that the missionary "applied to the people [= folk] to teach him their lore." What did he learn from them? Their lore; the Folk-lore of Cashmere. It did not become the Folk-lore of Cashmere after he had learnt it, or because he had learnt it.

Curiously enough, other words compounded with folk are not subject to the same ambiguity of meaning. No one doubts that Folk-tales, Folk-songs, Folk-wit, Folk-medicine, Folk-custom, and the like, are the tales, songs, wit, medicine, and customs, of and belonging to the folk, not such as are made by others about them; and, as a matter of fact. Folk-lore has, till recently, been used in a similar and corresponding sense. I do not think the present confusion could ever have arisen if the English language had possessed or preserved the idiom by which one of two nouns conjoined is put in the possessive case. Nobody supposes that a volkslied or a volksmärhrchen is a song or a tale about the people; it is plain from the construction that it is a song or a tale of the people themselves.

It is somewhat startling to a collector of Folk-lore to be told that what he has toiled to collect is not itself Folk-lore, though his knowledge of it is. He is tempted to ask, "What then have I been collecting?" "Folk-lore" is surely the only possible answer.

Mr. Stuart Glennie's proposition, that we can only know what the people believe by what they do, or say, or relate, appears incontrovertible, and is worth bearing in mind, especially when one is inclined to theorize. Upon it he constructs a symmetrical system of classification in Triads, under the three chief heads of Customs, Sayings, and Poesy.