perished, and in the field of folklore it is only from tinyfragments that we can gain a knowledge of how far our ancestors were able to maintain and transmit their own knowledge of the past.
Personally I think the transmission-power of tradition has been very much undervalued,[1] since we, in modern days, have so little experience of its possibilities and scope. But unlettered tradition will always be at the mercy of a slight cataclysm. It is not till tradition is committed to letters that its preservation is at all definitely assured. And this is a truth that, even in this century, is not yet sufficiently recognised. Societies such as ours must be the recorders. Our function as Recorders and Remembrancers is even more important than our function as Interpreters. Our opportunities for record are swiftly and silently slipping past. There will always be time for the Systematisers, but at present the Duty of Collection is to my mind paramount.
- ↑ If I may be permitted to refer to the Grimm's Centenary Papers, Oxford, 1886, I believe that my master, Dr. Vigfússon, made it most likely that the recollection of Sigfred was a thousand years old when the Northern colonist in Greenland made a Lay about the revenge taken for him, and when in these "Western Isles" of Britain, other Northern colonists made the Lays that deal with his fall, his wife's widowhood, and the death of his murderers. I hope ere long to print a conjecture of Dr. Vigfússon's as to another Teutonic hero of whom the memory has been supposed to have perished. I have not alluded to the well-known case of the gold-clad giant of Mold, a tradition that lived orally through several centuries at least, and the remarkable preservation of place-names in England through many centuries (frequently more than ten), merits more special notice than I can give here.
