Volume II Part 28 (2/2)
By this means, without further research, we may account for the similarity of the stuff of heroic myths and marchen. The stuff is the same as in nature myths and divine myths. But how is the similarity of the arrangement of the incidents and ideas into _plots_ to be accounted for? The sagas, epic myths, and marchen do not appear to resemble each other everywhere (as the nature-myths do), because they are the same ideas applied to the explanation of the same set of natural facts. The sagas, epics and marchen seem to explain nothing, but to be told, in the first instance, either to ill.u.s.trate and enforce a moral, or for the mere pleasure of imaginative narration.
We are thus left, provisionally, with the notion that occasionally the resemblance of plot and arrangement may be _accidental_. In shaking the mental kaleidoscope, which contains a given a.s.sortment of ideas, a.n.a.logous combinations may not impossibly be now and then produced everywhere. Or the story may have been invented once for all in one centre, but at a period so incalculably remote that it has filtered, in the exchanges and contacts of prehistoric life, all over the world, even to or from the Western Pacific and the lonely Oceanic Islands. Or, once more, the story may have had a centre in the Old World, say, in India; may have been carried to Europe by oral tradition or in literary vehicles, like the _Pantschatantra_ or the _Hitopadesa_, or by gypsies; may have reached the sailors, and trappers, and miners of civilisation, and may have been communicated by them (in times subsequent to the discovery of America by Columbus) to the backward races of the world.
These are preliminary statements of possibilities, and theories more or less based on those ideas are now to be examined.
The best plan may be to trace briefly the history of the study of popular tales. As early as Charles Perrault's time (1696), popular traditional tales had attracted some curiosity, more or less scientific.
Mademoiselle L'Heritier, the Abbe Villiers, and even the writer of the dedication of Perrault's _Contes_ to Mademoiselle, had expressed opinions as to the purposes for which they were first told, and the time and place where they probably arose. The Troubadours, the Arabs, and the fanciful invention of peasant nurses were vaguely talked of as possible first authors of the popular tales. About the same time, Huet, Bishop of Avranches, had remarked that the Hurons in North America amused their winter leisure with narratives in which beasts endowed with speech and reason were the chief characters.
Little was done to secure the scientific satisfaction of curiosity about traditional folk-tales, contes or marchen till the time when the brothers Grimm collected the stories of Hesse. The Grimms became aware that the stories were common to the peasant cla.s.s in most European lands, and that they were also known in India and the East. As they went on collecting, they learned that African and North American tribes also had their marchen, not differing greatly in character from the stories familiar to German firesides.
Already Sir Walter Scott had observed, in a note to the Lady of the Lake, that ”a work of great interest might be compiled upon the origin of popular fiction, and the transmission of similar tales from age to age, and from country to country. The mythology of one period would then appear to pa.s.s into the romance of the next, and that into the nursery tales of subsequent ages.” This opinion has long been almost universal.
Thus, if the story of Jason is found in Greek myths, and also, with a difference, in popular modern marchen, the notion has been that the marchen is the last and youngest form, the _detritus_ of the myth.
Now, as the myth is only known from literary sources (Homer, Mimnermus, Apollonius Rhodius, Euripides, and so on), it must follow, on this theory, that the people had borrowed from the literature of the more cultivated cla.s.ses. As a matter of fact, literature has borrowed far more from the people than the people have borrowed from literature, though both processes have been at work in the course of history.
But the question of the relations of marchen to myths, and of both to romance, may be left unanswered for the moment. More pressing questions are, what is the origin, and where the original home of the marchen or popular tales, and how have they been so widely diffused all over the world?
The answers given to these questions have naturally been modified by the widening knowledge of the subject. One answer seemed plausible when only the common character of European _contes_ was known; another was needed when the Aryan peoples of the East were found to have the same stories; another, or a modification of the second, was called for when marchen like those of Europe were found among the Negroes, the Indians of Brazil, the ancient Huarochiri of Peru, the people of Madagascar, the Samoyeds, the Samoans, the Dene Hareskins of the extreme American North-west, the Zulus and Kaffirs, the Bushmen, the Finns, the j.a.panese, the Arabs, and the Swahilis.
The Grimms, in the appendix to their _Household Tales_,* give a list of the stories with which they were acquainted. Out of Europe they note first the literary collections of the East, the Thousand and One Nights and the Hitopadesa, which, with the Book of Sinda-bad, and the Pantschatantra, and the Katharit Sagara, contain almost all of the Oriental tales that filtered into Western literature through written translations. The Grimms had not our store of folk-tales recently collected from the lips of the Aryan and non-Aryan natives of Hindostan, such as the works of Miss Maive Stokes, of Miss Frere, of Captain Steel, of Mr. Lai Behar Day, and the few Santal stories. But the Grimms had some Kalmuck stories.**
* Mrs. Hunt's translation, London, 1884.
** ”The relations of Ssidi Kur,” in Bergmann's _Nomadische Stretfereien_, vol. i.
One or two Chinese and j.a.panese examples had fallen into their hands, and all this as early as 1822. In later years they picked up a Malay story, some Bechuana tales, Koelle's Kanuri or Bornu stories, Schoolcraft's and James Athearn Jones's North American legends, Finnish, Esthonian and Mongolian narratives, and an increasing store of European _contes_. The Grimms were thus not unaware that the _marchen_, with their surprising resemblances of plot and incident, had a circulation far beyond the limits of the Ayran peoples. They were specially struck, as was natural, by the reappearance of incidents a.n.a.logous to those of the German _contes_ (such as _Machandelboom_ and the _Singing Bone_, 47, 28) among the remote Bechuanas of South Africa. They found, too, that in Sierra Leone beasts and birds play the chief parts in _marchen_. ”They have a much closer connection with humanity,... nay, they have even priests,” as the animals in Guiana have _peays_ or sorcerers of their own. ”Only the beasts of the country itself appear in the _marchen_.”
Among these Bornu legends they found several tales a.n.a.logous to _Faithful John_ (6), and to one in Stra-parola's _Piacevoli Notti_ (Venice, 1550), a story, by the way, which recurs among the Santals, an ”aboriginal” tribe of India. It is the tale of the man who knows the language of animals, and is warned by them against telling secrets to women. Among the Indians of North America Grimm found the a.n.a.logue of his tale (182) of the _Elves' Gifts_, which, by the way, also ill.u.s.trates a proverb in j.a.pan. Finnish, Tartar and Indian a.n.a.logues were discovered in plenty.
Such were Grimm's materials; much less abundant than ours, indeed, but sufficient to show him that ”the resemblance existing between the stories, not only of nations widely removed from each other by time and distance, but also between those which lie near together, consists partly in the underlying idea and the delineation of particular characters, and partly in the weaving together and unravelling of incidents”. How are these resemblances to be explained? That is the question. Grimm's answer was, as ours must still be, only a suggestion.
”There are situations so simple and natural that they reappear everywhere, just like the isolated words which are produced in a nearly or entirely identical form in languages which have no connection with each other, by the mere imitation of natural sounds.” Thus to a certain, but in Grimm's opinion to a very limited extent, the existence of similar situations in the marchen of the most widely separated peoples is the result of the common facts of human thought and sentiment.
To repeat a convenient ill.u.s.tration, if we find talking and rational beasts and inanimate objects, and the occurrence of metamorphosis and of magic, and of cannibals and of ghosts (as we do), in the marchen as in the higher myths of all the world, and if we also find certain curious human customs in the contes, these resemblances may be explained as born of the same early condition of human fancy, which regards all known things as personal and animated, which believes in ghosts and magic, while men also behave in accordance with customs now obsolete and forgotten in civilisation. These common facts are the threads (as we have said) in the cloth of myth and marchen. They were supplied by the universal early conditions of the prescientific human intellect; Thus the stuff of marchen is everywhere the same. But why are the patterns--the situations, and the arrangements, and sequence of incidents--also remarkably similar in the contes of unrelated and unconnected tribes and races everywhere?
Here the difficulty begins in earnest.
It is clearly not enough to force the a.n.a.logy, and reply that the patterns of early fabrics and the decorations of early weapons, of pottery, tattooing marks, and so forth, are also things universally human.*
* See Custom and Myth, ”The Art of Savages,” p. 288.
The close resemblances of undeveloped Greek and Mexican and other early artistic work are interesting, but may be accounted for by similarity of materials, of instruments, of suggestions from natural objects, and of inexperience in design. The selections of similar situations and of similar patterns into which these are interwoven in _marchen_, by Greeks, Huarochiris of Peru, and Samoans or Eskimos, is much more puzzling to account for.
Grimm gives some examples in which he thinks that the ideas, and their collocations in the story, can only have originally occurred to one mind, once for all. How is the wide distribution of such a story to be accounted for? Grimm first admits ”_as rare exceptions_ the probability of a story's pa.s.sing from one people to another, and firmly rooting itself in foreign soil”. But such cases, he says, are ”one or two solitary exceptions,” whereas the diffusion of stories which, in his opinion, could only have been invented once for all is an extensive phenomenon. He goes on to say, ”We shall be asked where the outermost lines of common property in stories begin, and how the lines of affinity are gradated”. His answer was not satisfactory even to himself, and the additions to our knowledge have deprived it of any value. ”The outermost lines are coterminous with those of the great race which is called Indo-Germanic.” Outside of the Indo-Germanic, or ”Aryan” race, that is to say, are found none of the _marchen_ which are discovered within the borders of that race. But Grimm knew very well himself that this was an erroneous belief. ”We see with amazement in such of the stories of the Negroes of Bornu and the Bechuanas (a wandering tribe in South Africa) as we have become acquainted with _an undeniable connection with the German ones_, while at the same time their peculiar composition distinguishes them from these.” So Grimm, though he found ”no decided resemblance” in North American stories, admitted that the boundaries of common property in marchen did include more than the ”Indo-Germanic”
race. Bechuanas, and Negroes, and Finns, as he adds, and as Sir George Dasent saw,* are certainly within the fold.
* _Popular Tales from the Norse_, 1859, pp. liv., lv.
There William Grimm left the question in 1856. His tendency apparently was to explain the community of the marchen on the hypothesis that they were the original common store of the undivided Aryan people, carried abroad in the long wanderings of the race. But he felt that the presence of the marchen among Bechuanas, Negroes and Finns was not thus to be explained. At the same time he closed the doors against a theory of borrowing, except in ”solitary exceptions,” and against the belief in frequent, separate and independent evolution of the same story in various unconnected regions. Thus Grimm states the question, but does not pretend to have supplied its answer.
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