Lore, by Professor Haddon, Mr. Abercromby, and Dr. Codrington. Those who have read these tales will agree with me, I think, that they are formless and void, and bear the same relation to good European fairy tales as the invertebrata do to the vertebrate kingdom in the animal world. Judging by them, at any rate, we should not be disposed to think that the majority of European folk-tales have descended unchanged from the time when the European world was savage. Yet when Europeans were savages they probably told fairy tales, and these were probably as amorphous as the fairy tales of Samoa or the Torres Straits.
One can therefore quite understand their disappearing when brought into competition with tales having a more definite backbone of plot. The human mind, and especially the uncultured mind, has limit to its capacity for remembering folk-tales. I am of opinion, from my own researches in folk-tale fauna of various districts of the British Isles, that one hundred tales is about as much as a peasant can remember.[1] If, therefore, at a stage subsequent to the primitive one, a number of tales having a definite plot are introduced into the country, a struggle for existence among the folk-tales would occur which would result in the almost total disappearance of the primitive stock. As a matter of history, we can actually watch a similar process going on in these Isles, where the superior artistry of Perrault’s or Grimm’s tales have caused almost the total disappearance of the original stock of English folk-tales, as I have found by sad experience.
This is what I believe has occurred in Europe, and I am supported in my belief by the remarkable similarity between the story-store of the various European countries. From the theory of transmission which I hold, this similarity can only be due to the migration of these tales from one country to another. Where these common
- ↑ A good Irish bard, however, was supposed to know one tale for each day of the year; but he would be a specialist.
