Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/119

 folk-tales that ingenuity has been wasted on the question: Who brought the stories from India and the East? The gipsies, say some, the Jews say others, the Crusaders form the subject of another suggestion, while Buddhist missionaries have been assumed to account for Russia's participation in the common story-store of Europe. Till the exclusively Indian origin has been put on a firmer footing than it is at present, we may let these theories mutually devour one another after the approved fashion of the Kilkenny cat.

And in this connection there comes in a practical application of our list of incidents which may be shortly referred to here. With such a list before us, running merely as a first attempt to some 700 numbers, it would be ridiculous for any holder of the Indian, or any other exclusive, origin of the folk-tale to be content with tracing only thirty or forty of these to their supposititious origin. Unless something like a majority can be so traced, no such conclusion can be maintained. Similarly, the adherents of the savage or anthropological theory may be asked to try their hand on our list on the same conditions.

Meanwhile, in this study of diffusion, the importance of end-links in the chain of dissemination becomes self-evident. We get rid of one complication when we get a nation who cannot pass on the tales further unless they throw them into the sea: Sicily and the Celtic lands of the British Isles are the chief examples of what I mean, and solution in this matter of diffusion is as likely to come from the study of the Celtic folk-tales of this island as from any other quarter I can think of.

As an example, I would take the group of tales known in Gaeldom as the Battle of the Birds, in Norse as The Master Maid, and in early Greece as the Jason-myth. The story with its incidents of The Three Tasks, The Escaping Couple, and The Obstacles to Pursuit (besides others like inanimates speaking and the oblivion embrace, which occur in many of the variants), is perhaps the widest spread of all folk-tales. Yet it gives us the impression of being a definite plot, of which the end has been thought out before the story is started. Now all the countries where this story is found have been in culture-contact with one another, and consequently the probabilities of its having been borrov/ed and diffused from a single centre are very great. How