laring it to be no mere
creation of the popular fancy, no chance expression of the uncultured
thought of the rude tiller of this or that soil. Rather is it believed
of most folk-tales that they, in their original forms, were framed
centuries upon centuries ago; while of some of them it is supposed
that they may be traced back through successive ages to those myths in
which, during a prehistoric period, the oldest of philosophers
expressed their ideas relative to the material or the spiritual world.

But it is not every popular tale which can boast of so noble a
lineage, and one of the great difficulties which beset the mythologist
who attempts to discover the original meaning of folk-tales in general
is to decide which of them are really antique, and worthy, therefore,
of being submitted to critical analysis. Nor is it less difficult,
when dealing with the stories of any one country in particular, to
settle which may be looked upon as its own property, and which ought
to be considered as borrowed and adapted. Everyone knows that the
existence of the greater part of the stories current among the various
European peoples is accounted for on two different hypotheses--the one
supposing that most of them "were common in germ at least to the Aryan
tribes before their migration," and that, therefore, "these traditions
are as much a portion of the common inheritance of our ancestors as
their language unquestionably is:"[11] the other regarding at least a
great part of them as foreign importations, Oriental fancies which
were originally introduced into Europe, through a series of
translations, by the pilgrims and merchants who were always linking
the East and the West together, or by the emissaries of some of the
heretical sects, or in the train of such warlike transferrers as the
Crusaders, or the Arabs who ruled in Spain, or the Tartars who so long
held the Russia of old times in their grasp. According to the former
supposition, "these very stories, these _Maehrchen_, which nurses still
tell, with almost the same words, in the Thuringian forest and in the
Norwegian villages, and to which crowds of children listen under the
pippal trees of India,"[12] belong "to the common heirloom of the
Indo-European race;" according to the latter, the majority of European
popular tales are merely naturalized aliens in Europe, being as little
the inheritance of its present inhabitants as were the stories and
fables which, by a circuitous rout