Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/101



Mr. : Ladies and Gentlemen,— I have, unfortunately, not been able to be present at the beginning of your Chairman's paper, but as far as I have heard it I agree with every word of it. I regard the whole question of the origin of folk-tales as mysterious, and one which will, perhaps, never be solved at all. As far as I understood Mr. Newell's ideas, I do not think I can sufficiently express how much I disagree with them all round. Mr. Newell seems to think that it was the cultivated people who shaped the stories and spread them, and the uncultivated who picked them up; but, as I have frequently said before, I hold an exactly opposite opinion. The large number of incidents making up the story or stories are like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. You may shake them as much as you please, constantly producing fresh combinations, but the pieces making them up always remain the same. In a similar way the incidents in fairy tales were constantly shaken, producing almost any form, and, bearing this in mind, the essence of this tale of the young man who wins his bride by doing feats is not far to seek. There were two ways of winning a bride: one was to buy her at the price of so many oxen, and the other was doing very remarkable and extraordinary things—in fact, doing such feats as are told of heroes in early tales. In this connection it is difficult to explain why these heroes are always enabled to perform their feats through a trick of the woman, and it is also remarkable that in these various stories there is such an extraordinary resemblance of incidents which might easily be separated and yet come together.

One of the things we are trying to examine is the diffusion of tales, and there is the mystery. India is supposed to be the centre of some of these tales, and yet we find them in other garments in Egypt long before India. We find them with the Eskimos and Zulus, where we can hardly suppose that any civilising influence has been the medium of their existence. I cannot think that they have been scattered by Spanish missionaries; nor can I offer any other explanation. Mr. Hartland's suggestion that exactly the same plot, in exactly the same shape, and with exactly the same incidents, can have been invented by several different persons independently of each other, seems to me inconceivable, and I, therefore, think it impossible for one to come to any conclusion except to assume that the stories are extremely old and have been carried to different countries.

As to Mr. Hartland's interesting details of unconscious plagiarism, I have myself come across some startling cases of this description. One was a case where the same story was published in Europe and America, but the explanation probably was that both authors had heard