Popular Tales from the Norse | Page 9

chain of evidence, which proves their Eastern origin.
If we are to seek for a simile, or an analogy, as to the relative positions
of these tales and traditions, and to the mutual resemblances which
exist between them as the several branches of our race have developed
them from the common stock, we may find it in one which will come
home to every reader as he looks round the domestic hearth, if he
should be so happy as to have one. They are like as sisters of one house
are like. They have what would be called a strong family likeness; but
besides this likeness, which they owe to father or mother, as the case
may be, they have each their peculiarities of form, and eye, and face,
and still more, their differences of intellect and mind. This may be dark,
that fair; this may have gray eyes, that black; this may be open and
graceful, that reserved and close; this you may love, that you can take
no interest in. One may be bashful, another winning, a third worth
knowing and yet hard to know. They are so like and so unlike. At first
it may be, as an old English writer beautifully expresses it, 'their father
hath writ them as his own little story', but as they grow up they throw
off the copy, educate themselves for good or ill, and finally assume
new forms of feeling and feature under an original development of their
own.
Or shall we take another likeness, and say they are national dreams;
that they are like the sleeping thoughts of many men upon one and the
same thing. Suppose a hundred men to have been eye-witnesses of
some event on the same day, and then to have slept and dreamt of it; we
should have as many distinct representations of that event, all turning
upon it and bound up with it in some way, but each preserving the
personality of the sleeper, and working up the common stuff in a higher
or lower degree, just as the fancy and the intellect of the sleeper was at
a higher or lower level of perfection. There is, indeed, greater truth in
this likeness than may at first sight appear. In the popular tale, properly

so called, the national mind dreams all its history over again; in its half
conscious state it takes this trait and that trait, this feature and that
feature, of times and ages long past. It snatches up bits of its old beliefs,
and fears, and griefs, and glory, and pieces them together with
something that happened yesterday, and then holds up the distorted
reflection in all its inconsequence, just as it has passed before that
magic glass, as though it were genuine history, and matter for pure
belief. And here it may be as well to say, that besides that old classical
foe of vernacular tradition, there is another hardly less dangerous,
which returns to the charge of copying, but changes what lawyers call
the venue of the trial from classical to Eastern lands. According to this
theory, which came up when its classical predecessor was no longer
tenable, the traditions and tales of Western Europe came from the East,
but they were still all copies. They were supposed to have proceeded
entirely from two sources; one the Directorium Humanae Vitae of John
of Capua, translated between 1262-78 from a Hebrew version, which
again came from an Arabic version of the 8th century, which came
from a Pehlvi version made by one Barzouyeh, at the command of
Chosrou Noushirvan, King of Persia, in the 6th century, which again
came from the Pantcha Tantra, a Sanscrit original of unknown
antiquity. This is that famous book of Calila and Dimna, as the Persian
version is called, attributed to Bidpai, and which was thus run to earth
in India. The second source of Western tradition was held to be that
still more famous collection of stories commonly known by the name
of the 'Story of the Seven Sages,' but which, under many names--Kaiser
Octavianus, Diocletianus, Dolopathos, Erastus, etc.--plays a most
important part in mediaeval romance. This, too, by a similar process,
has been traced to India, appearing first in Europe at the beginning of
the thirteenth century in the Latin Historia Septem Sapientum Romae,
by Dame Jehans, monk in the Abbey of Haute Selve. Here, too, we
have a Hebrew, an Arabic, and a Persian version; which last came
avowedly from a Sanscrit original, though that original has not yet been
discovered. From these two sources of fable and tradition, according to
the new copying theory, our Western fables and tales had come by
direct translation from the East. Now it will be at once evident that this
theory hangs on what may