Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/116

84 BOOK I.

Faithful John. have been circulated for the most part only among those who have no books, and many, if not most, of them have been made known only of late years for the first time to the antiquarians and philo- logists who have devoted their lives to hunting them out. How then do we find in Teutonic or Hindu stories not merely incidents which specially characterise the story of Odysseus, but almost the very words in which they are related in the Odyssey? The task of analysing and comparing these legends is not a light one even for those who have all the appliances of books and the aid of a body of men working with them for the same end. Yet old men and old women reproduce in India and Germany, in Norway, in Scotland, and in Ireland, the most subtle turns of thought and expression, and an endless series of complicated narratives, in which the order of incidents and the words of the speakers are preserved with a fidelity nowhere paralleled in the oral tradition of historical events. It may safely be said that no series of stories introduced in the form of translations from other languages could ever thus have filtered dcwn into the lowest strata of society, and thence have sprung up again, like Antaios, with greater energy and heightened beauty, and "nursery tales are generally the last things to be adopted by one nation from another." ^ But it is not safe to assume on the part of Highland peasants or Hindu nurses a familiarity with the epical literature of the Homeric or Vedic poets ; and hence the production of actual evidence in any given race for the independent growth of popular stories may be received as throwing fresh light on questions already practically solved, but can scarcely be regarded as indispen- sable. It can scarcely be necessary to prove that the tale of the Three Snake Leaves was not derived by the old German story-tellers from the pages of Pausanias, or that Beauty and the Beast was not suggested by Appuleius. There is nothing therefore which needs to surprise us in the fact that stories already familiar to the western Aryans have been brought to us in their eastern versions only as yesterday.

Probably no two stories furnish more convincing evidence of the extent to which the folk-lore of the Aryan tribes was developed, while they still lived as a single people, than that which we find in the German legend of Faithful John and the Deccan story of Rama and Luxman, who reflect the Rama and Laxmana of Parana legends. A comparison of these legends clearly shows that at least the follow- ing framework must have been devised before Hindus and Germans started on the long migration which was to lead the one to the

' Max Miiller, C/u'/>s, ii. 216.