Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/98

66 in the tales which exhibit the closest likeness in their most developed orms, the points of difference in detail and colouring are so striking as to leave no room for doubt that the Aryan tribes carried away with them for these stories no rigid types to which they were compelled to adhere with Egyptian slavishness, but living ideas which each tribe might from time to time clothe in a different garb. How these ideas were furnished is a question which it may be by no means as easy to answer as it is to resolve the life of Achilleus and Meleagros into the daily course of the sun through the heavens. It becomes therefore of the utmost importance in such an inquiry as this, to bring together and compare the popular traditions of nations whose geographical positions show that their parting when they left the common home was for them a final separation. No one could have the hardihood to maintain that the countrymen of Herman had access to the pages of Pausanias, or that the soldiers of Varus had in their childhood listened to stories borrowed from the epic of Wäinämöinen. Yet the children's tales gathered during the last half-century have established the general affinity of the folk-lore of Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Scandinavians, and a likeness not less astonishing runs through the popular tales of these races and those of the Hindu. In India, as in Germany, old women, who doubtless thought themselves fit for nothing, have preserved to us a series of exquisite legends which pour a flood of light on the early history of the human mind. The Hindu child is still roused and soothed by the stories of the sweet Star-Lady and the lovely Queen of the Five Flowers, just as the young German and Norseman used to listen to the tale of the beautiful Briar-rose sleeping in death-like stillness until the kiss of the pure Knight rouses her from her slumber. We are clearly debtors to the old women for the preservation of thousands of lovely and touching legends which have never found their way into epic poetry. Had it not been for the grandmothers of Hellas, we should in all likelihood never have heard of the grief of Dêmêtêr, as she sank down by the fountain in Eleusis, or of the woe of Telephassa, which ended as she sank to rest on the Thessalian plain in the evening. Schools in Athens, Thebes, or Argos, doubtless did their inevitable destructive work; but we can as little doubt that many an Athenian mother pointed on the slopes of Hymettos to the spot