Myths and Myth-Makers | Page 9

is utterly incredible that ten thousand stories,
constituting the entire mass of household mythology throughout a
dozen separate nations, should have been handed from one to another
in this way. No one would venture to suggest that the old grannies of
Iceland and Norway, to whom we owe such stories as the Master Thief
and the Princesses of Whiteland, had ever read Somadeva or heard of

the treasures of Rhampsinitos. A large proportion of the tales with
which we are dealing were utterly unknown to literature until they were
taken down by Grimm and Frere and Castren and Campbell, from the
lips of ignorant peasants, nurses, or house-servants, in Germany and
Hindustan, in Siberia and Scotland. Yet, as Mr. Cox observes, these old
men and women, sitting by the chimney-corner and somewhat timidly
recounting to the literary explorer the stories which they had learned in
childhood from their own nurses and grandmas, "reproduce the most
subtle turns of thought and expression, and an endless series of
complicated narratives, in which the order of incidents and the words of
the speakers are preserved with a fidelity nowhere paralleled in the oral
tradition of historical events. It may safely be said that no series of
stories introduced in the form of translations from other languages
could ever thus have filtered down into the lowest strata of society, and
thence have sprung up again, like Antaios, with greater energy and
heightened beauty." There is indeed no alternative for us but to admit
that these fireside tales have been handed down from parent to child for
more than a hundred generations; that the primitive Aryan cottager, as
he took his evening meal of yava and sipped his fermented mead,
listened with his children to the stories of Boots and Cinderella and the
Master Thief, in the days when the squat Laplander was master of
Europe and the dark-skinned Sudra was as yet unmolested in the
Punjab. Only such community of origin can explain the community in
character between the stories told by the Aryan's descendants, from the
jungles of Ceylon to the highlands of Scotland.
This conclusion essentially modifies our view of the origin and growth
of a legend like that of William Tell. The case of the Tell legend is
radically different from the case of the blindness of Belisarius or the
burning of the Alexandrian library by order of Omar. The latter are
isolated stories or beliefs; the former is one of a family of stories or
beliefs. The latter are untrustworthy traditions of doubtful events; but in
dealing with the former, we are face to face with a MYTH.
What, then, is a myth? The theory of Euhemeros, which was so
fashionable a century ago, in the days of the Abbe Banier, has long
since been so utterly abandoned that to refute it now is but to slay the

slain. The peculiarity of this theory was that it cut away all the
extraordinary features of a given myth, wherein dwelt its inmost
significance, and to the dull and useless residuum accorded the dignity
of primeval history. In this way the myth was lost without
compensation, and the student, in seeking good digestible bread, found
but the hardest of pebbles. Considered merely as a pretty story, the
legend of the golden fruit watched by the dragon in the garden of the
Hesperides is not without its value. But what merit can there be in the
gratuitous statement which, degrading the grand Doric hero to a level
with any vulgar fruit-stealer, makes Herakles break a close with force
and arms, and carry off a crop of oranges which had been guarded by
mastiffs? It is still worse when we come to the more homely folk-lore
with which the student of mythology now has to deal. The theories of
Banier, which limped and stumbled awkwardly enough when it was
only a question of Hermes and Minos and Odin, have fallen never to
rise again since the problems of Punchkin and Cinderella and the Blue
Belt have begun to demand solution. The conclusion has been
gradually forced upon the student, that the marvellous portion of these
old stories is no illegitimate extres-cence, but was rather the pith and
centre of the whole,[8] in days when there was no supernatural, because
it had not yet been discovered that there was such a thing as nature. The
religious myths of antiquity and the fireside legends of ancient and
modern times have their common root in the mental habits of primeval
humanity. They are the earliest recorded utterances of men concerning
the visible phenomena of the world into which they were born.
[8] "Retrancher le merveilleux d'un mythe, c'est le supprimer."--Breal,
Hercule et Cacus, p. 50.
That prosaic and coldly rational temper with which modern men are
wont to regard