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ON SOME JAPANESE LEGENDS.
BY
C. W. GOODWIN, Esq.
Read before the Asiatic Society of Japan,
on the 17th March, 1875.
———o———
It is more than sixty years ago since the publication by the brothers Grimm of a collection of popular and nursery tales which they they had gathered from the lips of the German peasantry, laid the foundation of a new study which has ever since been pursued with interest and ardour. The legends of nearly every country and province in the world have been assiduously sought for and recorded, and a comparison of them has led to many curions results. Some of these old wives tales, now only related for the amusement of children, are found to be disguised forms of old mythologies, others are the remains of poems or romances or perhaps even of veritable historical narratives. Stories which can be traced to Central Asia are found localized in remote corners of Europe, as though they had grown there spontaneously. Such an one is the story of the faithful hound Gelert, whose tomb is shown in Wales to the present day, at the village named Bedd-Gelert, although precisely the same legend is found in the ancient collection of Persian tales, known under the name of Syntipas, of which we possess a Greek translation. The question how and when these tales were spread over the world is one of much interest. Some of them may have been carried by the Aryan tribes
