BOOK I.
prepared to say that the borrowing was wholesale, and to determine the source of this exhaustless store of wealth, it is more prudent and more philosophical to admit that in every country the myths which have their roots in phrases relating to physical phenomena have been kept alive by independent tradition from the times of the first dispersion.
Aryan folklore.But if the story of Achilleus, as told in the Iliad, is only another form of the legend which relates the career of the Ithakan chief in the Odyssey; if this tale reappears in the Saga of the Volsungs and the Nibelungen Lied, in the epical cycles of Arthur and Charlemagne, in the lay of Beowulf and the Shahnameh of Firdusi, and if further all these streams of popular poetry can be traced back to a common source in phrases which described the sights and sounds of the outward world, the resemblances thus traced are nevertheless by no means so astonishing as the likeness which runs through a vast number of the popular tales of Germany and Scandinavia, of Greece and Rome, of Persia and Hindustan. On the hypothesis of a form of thought which attributed conscious life to all physical objects, we must at once admit that the growth of a vast number of cognate legends was inevitable. Nor is there anything bewildering in the fact, that phrases which denoted at first the death of the dawn, or her desertion by the sun as he rose in the heavens, or the stealing away of the evening light by the powers of darkness, should give birth to the legends of Helen and Guenevere, of Brynhild and Gudrun, of Paris and of Lancelot, of Achilleus and Sigurd. All that this theory involves is that certain races of mankind, or certain tribes of the same race, were separated from each other while their language still invested all sensible things with a personal life, and that when the meaning of the old words was either wholly or in part forgotten, the phenomena of the earth and the heavens reappeared as beings human or divine, and the Pani, or Night, which sought to lure Saramâ, the Dawn, into his dismal cave, became the Paris who beguiled Helen to Troy, and the Lancelot who corrupted the faith of the wife of Arthur.
Legends seemingly not resolvable into phrases relating to physical phenomena.The wonder becomes greater when from the necessary outgrowth of certain conditions of thought and speech we turn to popular stories which appear at first sight as if they could not be brought within this class of epical legends, and which yet exhibit, in spite of differences of detail and local colouring, a closeness of resemblance which establishes their substantial identity. If, among the stories which Hindu, Persian, Greek, or Teutonic mothers recounted to their children, we find tales which turn on the same incidents, and in their most delicate touches betray the influence of precisely the