Page:The Science of Fairy Tales.djvu/359

 his making valid deductions. Perhaps even yet we are hardly in a position to do this; but at all events the sources of possible error are diminished by the wider area we are able to survey, and from the evidence of which we reason. We have compared the stories, both mediæval and modern, mentioned by Liebrecht, with märchen and sagas told among nations outside European influence in various degrees of civilization, down to the savagery of Kaffirs and Dyaks. We have succeeded in classifying their differences, and in spite of them we have found all the tales in substantial agreement. They are all built on the same general plan; the same backbone of thought runs through them; and between them all there is no greater divergence than that which in the physical realm separates mammal from bird, or bird from reptile. It is inevitable to conclude that even the most recently discovered folktale of them has come to us from a distant period when our forefathers were in the same rude state as Dyaks and South Sea Islanders. No actual adventure of Wild Edric or Raymond of Lusignan gave rise to these stories. English patriot and Burgundian Count were only the names whereon they fastened,—the mountains which towered above the plain and gathered about their heads the vapours already floating in the atmosphere. We must therefore go back far beyond the Middle Ages to learn in what manner we are to understand these stories,—back to the state of savagery whence the inhabitants of Europe had long emerged when Map and Gervase wrote, but of which the relics linger among us even yet.

The necessarily meagre exposition of some of the most salient characteristics of savage thought with which we started has been illustrated and its outlines filled in to some extent in the course of the subsequent discussions. I need not, therefore, do more than draw attention as briefly as possible to those characteristics that are relevant here. First and foremost, we have found some