Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/357

Rh Another proof lays in the fact that we very often cannot exactly draw the line which excludes a simple, witty tale from a fairy-tale, and there is no collection where apologues and fables are not published together with fairy-tales under the same heading. They are often enough invisibly passing from one into the other, and vice versâ.

The positive undoubted proof is lastly given by the fact I put at the beginning in form of a question, viz. that we can actually follow step by step the change from a tale or apologue or religious legend into a well-known and far-famed fairy-tale.

Some examples may now be adduced for it, and I confess that I feel rather the difficulty of a choice, as there are examples innumerable. If we read the Laïs of Marie de France with the annotations ot R. Köhler, or the Gesta Romanorum in the edition of Oesterley, or any of the great collections of the early romances, or the History of Fiction of Dunlop, in the German translation of Liebrecht, my views are then fully confirmed. I confine myself only to few of them, being ready to extend this investigation over the whole extant materials.

One of the very famous legends of the Middle Ages was the legend of Amys and Amylion, where two friends help each other to the utmost of their power, when one falls ill of leprosy, and as the angel says to Sir Amys in a vision: If Sir Amys, on the festival of the Nativity, would cut the throats of his two children, and anoint the leprous sores with their blood, the disease, which was incurable by all other means, would instantly disappear. Sir Amys follows the advice given to him, and cures his friend, but this act is rewarded by a heavenly miracle, for the slain children are revived. This story is based upon the old medical superstition as to the symbolical influence of blood; and the legend tells of a similar cure proposed to Constantine the Great, who, however, at the admonition of Pope Sylvester, refrains from this wicked deed, and is cured from leprosy through a bath in holy water instead of blood. Very numerous are the other parallel stories and legends current in the Middle Ages, till they are crystalized in the above-mentioned romance. From the romance it passed into the fairy-tale, where we meet regularly two friends, and not only one, as in the old legend. So we find it in Germany (Grimm, 6), Greece (Hahn, 22), Italy (Pentamerne, 39), Russia