Popular Tales from the Norse | Page 3

his earliest youth. They are Nursery Tales, in fact,
of the days when there were tales in nurseries--old wives' fables, which

have faded away before the light of gas and the power of steam. It is
long, indeed, since English nurses told these tales to English children
by force of memory and word of mouth. In a written shape, we have
long had some of them, at least, in English versions of the Contes de
ma Mère l' Oye of Perrault, and the Contes de Fées of Madame
D'Aulnoy; those tight-laced, high- heeled tales of the 'teacup times' of
Louis XIV and his successors, in which the popular tale appears to as
much disadvantage as an artless country girl in the stifling atmosphere
of a London theatre. From these foreign sources, after the voice of the
English reciter was hushed--and it was hushed in England more than a
century ago--our great-grandmothers learnt to tell of Cinderella and
Beauty and the Beast, of Little Red Riding-hood and Blue Beard,
mingled together in the Cabinet des Fées with Sinbad the Sailor and
Aladdin's wondrous lamp; for that was an uncritical age, and its spirit
breathed hot and cold, east and west, from all quarters of the globe at
once, confusing the traditions and tales of all times and countries into
one incongruous mass of fable, as much tangled and knotted as that
famous pound of flax which the lassie in one of these Tales is expected
to spin into an even wool within four-and-twenty hours. No poverty of
invention or want of power on the part of translators could entirely
destroy the innate beauty of those popular traditions; but here, in
England at least, they had almost dwindled out, or at any rate had been
lost sight of as home-growths. We had learnt to buy our own children
back, disguised in foreign garb; and as for their being anything more
than the mere pastime of an idle hour--as to their having any history or
science of their own--such an absurdity was never once thought of. It
had, indeed, been remarked, even in the eighteenth century--that dreary
time of indifference and doubt--that some of the popular traditions of
the nations north of the Alps contained striking resemblances and
parallels to stories in the classical mythology. But those were the days
when Greek and Latin lorded it over the other languages of the earth;
and when any such resemblance or analogy was observed, it was
commonly supposed that that base-born slave, the vulgar tongue, had
dared to make a clumsy copy of something peculiarly belonging to the
twin tyrants who ruled all the dialects of the world with a pedant's rod.
At last, just at the close of that great war which Western Europe waged

against the genius and fortune of the first Napoleon; just as the
eagle--Prometheus and the eagle in one shape--was fast fettered by
sheer force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose a man in
Central Germany, on the old Thuringian soil, to whom it was given to
assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke of
classical tyranny, and to claim for all the dialects of Teutonic speech a
right of ancient inheritance and perfect freedom before unsuspected and
unknown. It is almost needless to mention this honoured name. For the
furtherance of the good work which he began nearly fifty years ago, he
still lives and still labours. There is no spot on which an accent of
Teutonic speech is uttered where the name of Jacob Grimm is not a
'household word'. His General Grammar of all the Teutonic Dialects
from Iceland to England has proved the equality of these tongues with
their ancient classical oppressors. His Antiquities of Teutonic Law have
shown that the codes of the Lombards, Franks, and Goths were not
mere savage, brutal customaries, based, as had been supposed, on the
absence of all law and right. His numerous treatises on early German
authors have shown that the German poets of the Middle Age, Godfrey
of Strasburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartman von der Aue, Walter
von der Vogelweide, and the rest, can hold their own against any
contemporary writers in other lands. And lastly, what rather concerns
us here, his Teutonic Mythology, his Reynard the Fox, and the
collection of German Popular Tales, which he and his brother William
published, have thrown a flood of light on the early history of all the
branches of our race, and have raised what had come to be looked on as
mere nursery fictions and old wives' fables--to a study fit for the
energies of grown men, and to all the dignity of a science.
In these pages, where we have to run over a vast tract of space, the
reader who wishes