d most manifestly to typify
the conflict of opposing elements--whether of Good and Evil, or of
Light and Darkness, or of Heat and Cold, or of any other pair of
antagonistic forces or phenomena. The typical hero of this class of
stories, who represents the cause of right, and who is resolved by
mythologists into so many different essences, presents almost
identically the same appearance in most of the countries wherein he
has become naturalized. He is endowed with supernatural powers, but he
remains a man, for all that. Whether as prince or peasant, he alters
but very little in his wanderings among the Aryan races of Europe.

And a somewhat similar statement may be made about his feminine
counterpart--for all the types of Fairy-land life are of an
epicene nature, admitting of a feminine as well as a masculine
development--the heroine who in the Skazkas, as well as in other
folk-tales, braves the wrath of female demons in quest of means
whereby to lighten the darkness of her home, or rescues her bewitched
brothers from the thraldom of an enchantress, or liberates her captive
husband from a dungeon's gloom.

But their antagonists--the dark or evil beings whom the hero attacks
and eventually destroys, or whom the heroine overcomes by her virtues,
her subtlety, or her skill--vary to a considerable extent with the
region they occupy, or rather with the people in whose memories they
dwell. The Giants by killing whom our own Jack gained his renown, the
Norse Trolls, the Ogres of southern romance, the Drakos and Lamia of
modern Greece, the Lithuanian Laume--these and all the other groups of
monstrous forms under which the imagination of each race has embodied
its ideas about (according to one hypothesis) the Powers of Darkness
it feared, or (according to another) the Aborigines it detested,
differ from each other to a considerable and easily recognizable
extent. An excellent illustration of this statement is offered by the
contrast between the Slavonic group of supernatural beings of this
class and their equivalents in lands tenanted by non-Slavonic members
of the Indo-European family. A family likeness will, of course, be
traced between all these conceptions of popular fancy, but the gloomy
figures with which the folk-tales of the Slavonians render us familiar
may be distinguished at a glance among their kindred monsters of
Latin, Hellenic, Teutonic, or Celtic extraction. Of those among the
number to which the Russian skazkas