semble our märchen, or are quite recent importations by Europeans, Dutch, French, English, and others.[1] Here we are on ground where proof is difficult, if not impossible. Assuredly French influence declares itself in certain narratives collected from the native tribes of North America. On the other hand, when the märchen is interwoven with the national traditions and poetry of a remote people, and with the myths by which they account to themselves for the natural features of their own country, the hypothesis of recent borrowing from Europeans appears insufficient. A striking example is the song of Siati (a form of the Jason myth) among the people of Samoa.[2] Even more remarkable is the presence of a crowd of familiar märchen in the national traditions of the Huarochiri, a pre-Inca civilised race of Southern Peru. These were published, or at least collected and written down, by Francisco de Avila, a Spanish priest, about 1608. He remarks that "these traditions are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people of this province."[3] These traditions refer to certain prehistoric works of engineering or accidents of soil, whereby the country was drained. The Huarochiris explained them by a series of märchen about Huthiacuri, Pariaca (culture-heroes), and about friendly animals which aided them in the familiar way. In the same manner exactly the people of the Marais of Poitou have to account for the drain-
- ↑ Cosquin, op. cit., 1, xix.
- ↑ Turner's Samoa, p. 102.
- ↑ Rites of the Incas. Hakluyt Society. The third document in the book. The märchen have been examined by me in The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche, p. lxxii.
