Tales, on which he is now engaged. Until these groups have been analysed it is probably vain to expect that any satisfactory suggestions will be offered as to the real source and primitive shape of The Outcast Child. Professor De Gubernatis has, indeed, made some guesses on the subject,[1] but, it seems to me, without much success. The stories he cites certainly demand further inquiry. Two of them are, like the first three types we have just considered, Youngest-best stories. But none includes the essential incident of expulsion by the father of the only child who ultimately proves faithful to him. Still it is of course possible that the intermediate steps may be discovered, and one or more of these narratives may be proved to be rightly assigned as an early form of King Lear.
Meantime, this paper has already grown to too great a length, and I will now detain the reader only to point out that the framework of the tale has nothing in it of the marvellous, and, consequently, it lends itself with more than usual ease to the transformation from märchen to saga. This transformation is a great assistance to the preservation of folk-tales as literature, and frequently, also, while still in the mouths of the people. The oldest variant is found already converted into a saga in the book of Genesis; and it is not too much to say that it is this change which has not only preserved it for us, but has rendered it the most widely known of all. King Lear, too, owes its enduring life to the same cause. The tendency of the tale towards saga shape may be studied still farther in The Language of Beasts type, where more than one of the variants will be found in process of conversion. The name of Pope Innocent is one step. It would not have required much help from favouring circumstances, nor much effort of pious fraud or sincere enthusiasm, to proceed a little further, and, identifying the hero with one of the popes of that name, to add a few more particulars of persons and places, so as to develop a complete saga. Similar indications will be noted in other examples.
- ↑ Zoological Mythology, vol. i. p. 84, vol. ii. p. 2.30. The learned Professor omits to give the exact reference to Ælian, from whom he cites the stories of the hoopoe and the lark. They will be found De Nat. Anim. lib. xvi. c. 5.
