INTRODUCTION. AMONG the marvels of the inchanted land of Folklore none is greater than the freshness which every form retains, although it may be presented to us in a hundred different dresses. We may see and feel that under all these disguises we are looking on the same being; but we are never tired of listening to the tale of his adventures, slightly as these may be varied in each of the many versions of his history. The repetition never wearies us: the monotony never becomes irksome. Even when by long acquaintance with some of these tales we know what is going to happen in others, we read or listen for the thousandth time with the feeling that whether for old or young these stories can never lose their charm. The child to whom is told the old Greek tale of Psychê and Love,-how she was carried away to a cave in a lonely garden, where her sisters told her that she was wedded to a hideous monster, how by their evil counsels she rose up in the night to look at her lover, how Love wakened by a drop of oil from her torch vanished away in the form of a dove, how Psychê sought for him in all lands and found him again at last after achieving three marvellous tasks,—will say at once, This is the story of Beauty and the Beast, or something very like it. But neither the child's wonder nor his delight will be lessened when he reads in Grimm's story of the Soaring Lark, how the youngest of three daughters whose father had to go a long journey, would have him bring her a singing, soaring lark; how he found the bird on a tree near a splendid castle, and how, as he was going to take it, a lion sprang from behind and said that he should never have it unless he promised to give him his daughter as his wife; how, when she had been wedded, the loathly lion became at night a beautiful prince who told her that no ray of light must fall upon him; how after a while at the marriage of one of her sisters a ray pierced through a chink of the door and fell like a hair line upon the prince, who in the same instant that it touched him was changed into a dove; how when the dove flew away she sought him for seven years, and then, aided by the Sun, the Moon, and the North wind, she found her husband in the power of a monstrous caterpillar; how the maiden attacked the huge insect which turned into a woman and again carried the prince away on the back of a griffin; and how, when the prince was to be married to her enemy, she was suffered to enter his room first for the golden robe which the Sun gave her, and then for the golden hen and chickens which had been the gift of the Moon, and how on the second night the prince awoke and found by his side the maiden who had sought for him over the wide earth. The child, as he reads, knows here that the maiden is Psychê, and that in the end she shall meet him whom she has lost; but he is none the less pleased when he sees the same beautiful form in the more homely dress of the Gaelic tale, which tells how the Daughter of the Skies* married a dog who at night became a splendid man, and when he discerns the magic gifts of the Teutonic bride in the wonderful shears, needle, and clue which are made the means of winning back the lost love of the Gaelic maiden. When he has read further the tale of the Twelve Brothers, of the Little Brother and Sister, * Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands,' i. 282. of Hansel and Grethel, of the Six Swans, and of Little Snow White in Grimm's Household Stories,' he will begin to feel that there is a whole family of legends in which a maiden has a beautiful lover on whom she is not suffered to look, while a jealous mother or jealous sisters insist that the lover is hideous, and tempt her to look at him while he is asleep. In all he will discern the same machinery bringing about the same result,—the dropping of the burning liquid, the change of the man into the bird, the weary wandering and the joyful reunion after the accomplishment of superhuman tasks. Soon perhaps he may find that there is another group of legends in which the parts are inverted, and in which it is the bride who is snatched away, while the bridegroom has to seek her through many a weary year. Turn where he may, the same images will meet his eye: and the beings who love and suffer in the Norse tale of East of the Sun and West of the Moon,* are the beings whose joys and sorrows are told again in the Hindu legend of Urvasî and Purûravas,† in the Deccan tale of the 6 * See the tale in Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse,' and the poem so intitled in Mr. Morris's Earthly Paradise.' † Max Müller, 'Chips from a German Workshop,' ii. 114, &c. |