with her, and there conquers a
dragon which comes to feast on the dead bodies. The dragon is compelled
to fetch the waters of life and death, by means of which the hero brings
his dead love back to life. Marya, the White Swan, however, proved
herself so ungrateful that after awhile she took another husband, and
twice she acted the part of Delilah to Mikailo. The third time she tried
it he was compelled in self-defence to put an end to her wiles by
cutting off her head. This is honest, downright death. There is no
mistaking it. But then it is impossible that Marya, the White Swan, was
a mere ghost filched from the dead and eager to return. Yet the story of
Marya is equally a Swan-maiden story, and is just as good to build a
theory on as Map's variant of Wild Edric.[243]

In replying, however, to the arguments of so learned and acute a writer
as Liebrecht, it is not enough to point out these distinctions and
inconsistencies: it is not enough to show that the terms of the taboo do
not warrant the construction he has put upon them, nor that he has
failed to account for very significant incidents. If he has mistaken the
meaning of the legends, we should be able to make clear the source of
his error. It arises, I hold, from an imperfect apprehension of the
archaic philosophy underlying the narratives. Liebrecht's comparisons
are, with one exception, limited to European variants. His premises were
thus too narrow to admit of his making valid deductions. Perhaps even
yet we are hardly in a position to do this; but at all events the
sources of possible error are diminished by the wider area we are able
to survey, and from the evidence of which we reason. We have compared
the stories, both mediaeval and modern, mentioned by Liebrecht, with
_maerchen_ and sagas told among nations outside European influence in
various degrees of civilization, down to the savagery of Kaffirs and
Dyaks. We have succeeded in classifying their differences, and in spite
of them we have found all the tales in substantial agreement. They are
all built on the same general plan; the same backbone of thought runs
through them; and between them all there is no greater divergence than
that which in the physical realm separates mammal from bird, or bird
from reptile. It is inevitable to conclude that even the most recently
discovered folk-tale of them has come to us from a distant period when
our forefathers were in the same rude state as Dyaks and South Sea
Is