Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/316

308 THE OUTCAST CHILD.

LLUMINATED by the genius of Shakspeare, consecrated by the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures, told by word of mouth in humbler fashion by mother to babe from the Himalayas to the forests of Brazil, from the Siberian steppes to the shores of the Mediterranean, the story of the child rejected by his father and family for a slight offence more apparent than real, who yet from an outcast becomes a prince and compels the parent who has treated him so cruelly to acknowledge his wrong, has charmed the ears and enthralled the hearts of many a tribe in the Old World, and has been carried by some of them across the ocean. The story of King Lear has been written down for seven centuries; that of Joseph and his Brethren probably four times that period. Until recent years there was little reason to suspect that these two stories had any fundamental connection; but the publication of collections of folk-tales, which has increased so rapidly during the last three decades, now enables us to determine their relation, and to show that they are but two of the forms assumed by a narrative essentially the same, when told in widely distant countries and among peoples sundered as far by difference of manners, faith and social organization, as of land and climate. I propose in these pages to examine some of the forms thus assumed, and to attempt a classification of them.

They fall into five distinct types. Three of these are examples of that series of myths in which the hero is the youngest of several children, and which are commonly known to folk-lore students as Youngest-best stories.

In the first the conduct of the elder children is strongly contrasted with that of the youngest. This I call the King Lear type. Its