Russian Fairy Tales | Page 4

who are better known to the outer world than
Cinderella--the despised and flouted younger sister, who long sits
unnoticed beside the hearth, then furtively visits the glittering halls of
the great and gay, and at last is transferred from her obscure nook to the
place of honor justly due to her tardily acknowledged merits.
Somewhat like the fortunes of Cinderella have been those of the
popular tale itself. Long did it dwell beside the hearths of the common
people, utterly ignored by their superiors in social rank. Then came a
period during which the cultured world recognized its existence, but
accorded to it no higher rank than that allotted to "nursery stories" and
"old wives' tales"--except, indeed, on those rare occasions when the
charity of a condescending scholar had invested it with such a garb as
was supposed to enable it to make a respectable appearance in polite
society. At length there arrived the season of its final change, when,
transferred from the dusk of the peasant's hut into the full light of the
outer day, and freed from the unbecoming garments by which it had
been disfigured, it was recognized as the scion of a family so truly
royal that some of its members deduce their origin from the olden gods

themselves.
In our days the folk-tale, instead of being left to the careless
guardianship of youth and ignorance, is sedulously tended and held in
high honor by the ripest of scholars. Their views with regard to its
origin may differ widely. But whether it be considered in one of its
phases as a distorted "nature-myth," or in another as a demoralized
apologue or parable--whether it be regarded at one time as a relic of
primeval wisdom, or at another as a blurred transcript of a page of
mediæval history--its critics agree in declaring 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
Mährchen, 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 route, were transmitted
from India to Boccaccio or La Fontaine.
On the questions to which these two conflicting hypotheses give rise
we will not now dwell. For the present, we will deal with the Russian
folk-tale as we find it, attempting to become acquainted with its
principal characteristics to see in what respects it chiefly differs from
the stories of the same class which are current among ourselves, or in
those foreign lands with which we are more familiar than we are with
Russia, rather