Folklore, a term first suggested by W. J. Thoms in 1846 (Athenæum, August 22, under his well-known signature 'Ambrose Merton') to designate what was then for the first time becoming a subject of wide popular interest, considered as a department of the study of antiquities or archaeology, and embracing everything that related to ancient observances and customs, to the notions, beliefs, traditions, superstitions, and prejudices of the common people. Folklore, as understood by Mr Thoms, had indeed been observed and noted by countless writers from the Father of History downwards; the Gentleman's Magazine in the 18th century, and, in the 19th, his own well-known journal Notes and Queries (instituted 1851) being invaluable repositories of such observed facts; but it was not till after the beginning of the 19th century that the value of folklore for the elucidation of the social history of mankind had become apparent to thinkers, and its systematic study been seriously begun. Nor had there been wanting special collections of detached facts, very varied in quality but all of precious value now, by curious antiquaries, as John Aubrey in his Miscellanies (1696), or by speculative original thinkers, as Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646). The former discussed in a gossiping manner such matters as omens, dreams, corpse candles, and second-sight; and another work by the same credulous author, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (ed. by James Britten, 1881), 'did not disdain to quote' a multitude of ancient customs which would otherwise have been forgotten, and which have proved to be a precious mine for later and more scientific students. The Rev. Henry Bourne published at Newcastle in 1725 his Antiquitates Vulgares, or the Antiquities of the Common People, valuable chiefly for its record of old popular customs connected with the feasts of the church; and at the same city John Brand published in 1777 the first edition of his famous Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain. This work, as subsequently enlarged by himself, partly from the stores of miscellaneous facts of folklore collected in Sinclair's Statistical Account of Scotland (1791-95), and thoroughly revised by Sir Henry Ellis in 1813, ill arranged as it is, remains the richest of such storehouses of folklore as formerly—of materials for folklore as now—understood. Of other books containing similar records more or less valuable of detached facts, it may be enough here to name Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801); Hone's Every Day Book (1826-27), Table Book (1827-28), and Year Book (1829); and Chambers's Book of Days (1863).
Meantime the reawakening to natural poetry, and to the beauty of free emotional expression in literature, which lay at the foundation of what it is usual to call Romanticism, had already begun even in the 18th century, and the publication of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) had given a powerful impulse to Scott and others in England, to Herder, and to Arnim and Brentano in Germany, who found lying to hand a rich wealth of traditional poetry, the poetic value of which they fortunately had the eyes to see. But the study of folk-songs really began with Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3). It was perhaps an advantage rather than a disadvantage that the first worker in this new field was but the folklorist unawares and mere great poet and romancer of genius that he was; for our folk-poetry would never have enriched and permanently influenced all later English literature but for its own intrinsic and genuine poetic quality, any more than our detached folklore facts would ever have risen above the dignity of the whimsical pastime of an idle hour but for their inherent though unsuspected faculty for throwing light backwards upon the history of human civilisation. And it is fortunate for us that we have had before us a succession of antiquarian students with curiosity enough to note and preserve things strange for their own sakes—facts merely half-understood or entirely misunderstood, but yet to be co-ordinated and systematised by later ages after a really scientific spirit had been born. The spread of book-learning and the inevitable diffusion of rationalistic ideas, the levelling of the ancient social distinctions, and the creation of totally new industrial conditions transplanting the people from the customs and ancient habitations of their fathers have stopped short the current of popular belief which has flowed traditionally down in undisturbed but ever-widening stream from the mists of obscure antiquity, and turned its waters, rich with the fertilising faculty of imagination, to overflow new fields within the vast vistas of science. Popular traditions began to be valued duly just as they began to decline and disappear; but fortunately a plentiful crop had been gathered and put into writing beyond the risk of oblivion before the growing disfavour for everything supernatural but religion itself, and the impatience of anything beyond the range of the practical and the profitable, had stripped our people of everything they had received from their fathers.
Yet the task of the folklore-collector even in England is not at an end, though the conditions under which he has to work are materially altered; for countless ancient notions still survive, although in strangely altered form, and although our citizens fondly imagine in all the pride natural to a little learning that all old things have been put away, and that all things have become new. The most consciously rational mind is ever unconsciously swayed by impulses and habits, the origins of which are so obscure as to be entirely unknown and even unsuspected, but which weigh irresistibly though imperceptibly upon it. Yet these are the real springs of thought and the ultimate motives of character and conduct, so powerful is the effect of hereditary impressions upon man, so weak compared with it is even the influence upon the individual of the immediate environment in which he breathes. At no stage in human history is there ever a violent disruption from the preceding: society, like time itself, innovateth greatly but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived. And, just as the biologist reasons back step by step from ascertained and verifiable facts to the most obscure and mysterious phenomena of life, so the scientific student of folklore co-ordinates the results of observation and experience, and builds them into a unity in a system that transcends the sphere of archaeology and even anthropology itself, and forms an integral part of the living structure of human sociology. But, while the laborious student may be permitted to indulge the dream that his studies will supply some of the stones with which this stupendous temple may yet be built, he must not forget that to his generation belongs only the task of accumulating these materials, and that the building itself must be left to the larger generalisations of future ages. Meantime such works as Mr E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), from a wide comparison of the essential identities and analogies between European and savage customs and superstitions, and Mr G. L. Gomme's Folklore Relics of Early Village Life (1883), from a close observation of the affinities between our own village and homestead customs with those of other lands, have shown us what large and significant constructive results may already be attained with the evidence we possess. It is the peculiar merit of Mr Tylor to have demonstrated the evidential value of such survivals of more or less savage earlier states of society as still exist among us to reflect light upon the past. 'Survival in culture, placing all along the course of advancing civilisation way-marks full of meaning to those who can decipher their signs, even now sets up in our midst primeval monuments of barbaric thought and life. Its investigation tells strongly in favour of the view that the European may find among the Greenlanders or Maoris many a trait for reconstructing the picture of his own primitive ancestors.'
Just as the science of archaeology has been laboriously built up out of the relics of old races that have been brought to light, so the task of the folklorist is to construct the philosophy of primitive man from its still-surviving relics. These linger longest among the least progressive peoples, and it is in their superstitious and stories, whether in their native irrationality or as rationalised by a shallow philosophy, that the student will find the richest and most plentiful materials. He must not confine his pursuit of analogies to the experiences of merely Aryan or yet Old-World races, for in the survivals to be seen in the religious rituals and ceremonial traditions of the most civilised peoples he will find things absolutely identical with the beliefs and customs of present-day savages in Africa or the South Sea Islands. He will find in the most advanced a basis of absolute irrationality, or things believed in just because they are irrational—a process that gives a singular strength even to minds within the range of the highest religions; and this he will find it impossible to explain satisfactorily by other principles than those he applies to parallel and analogous irrationalities in Samoa or Zululand—there, however, neither irrational nor anomalous, but perfectly explicable in harmony with the universally accepted philosophy of life. Indeed, the wider the study applied to the social history of man, the more absolute becomes the certainty of the substantial uniformity in the working of the human mind under the same physical conditions everywhere. The civilised man preserves the fact, or the shadow of the fact, from the conservatism natural to man; the savage is more philosophical in his unconscious irrationality, and preserves the reasons for it also. Neither identity of race, nor community of origin, nor conscious borrowing need be postulated here; this theory is firmly based upon the elemental law of human nature—that the minds of men at parallel levels of culture are everywhere substantially the same, and develop naturally along the same lines in that gradual progress upwards, which is ever in movement, though ever differing in degree. The fundamental bases of popular beliefs then are everywhere the same: what is due to the particular race is the particular development of the belief. Gods, who are mere magnified men, capable like them of being influenced by magical powers, and not more superior than men themselves to transformation into human and bestial forms; spiritual existences which pervade all nature, animate and inanimate alike, adding the human attribute of personality to all visible objects; ghost-souls surviving in shadowy form beyond the grave—these are the fundamental assumptions of all mythologies, and the essential foundations of the religion of all men. What race adds is the particular poetical form and colour with which the human imagination clothes its shadows. It is the peculiar merit of Mr Andrew Lang's contribution to the science to have elucidated this explanation with such felicitous wealth of illustration as to have made it the accepted working hypothesis of most modern mythologists, who are often grouped together as forming the anthropological school. It may be said that to him more than to any other scholar is due the widespread belief in the substantial identity between the most irrational and rudimentary mythologies and those of the Greeks, Scandinavians, and Hindus, however disguised or adorned these may be in the poetical accretions of successive generations of culture. His brilliant polemic has brought over most of the waverers into his camp.
Here, before going further, the reader has a right to demand that the relations between folklore and mythology should be set forth. The former will shortly be defined at more length; here it may be enough to say that mythology is properly the special science which treats of myths or legends of cosmogony, of gods and heroes. 'A myth embodies in human form primitive man's conception of a non-human action.' It, again, is sharply differentiated from religion, which, at its lowest, involves the conception of visible or invisible supernatural powers ascending into the range of the divine, whether beneficent or maleficent to man, and early concerned in establishing moral relations with humanity, the maintenance of which it regulates by a postulated system of rewards and punishments, distributed here or hereafter. With its beginnings, whether due to an original divine tradition, or to the innate sensus numinis—a necessity of man's complex nature—or to man projecting subjectively his own shadow upon the mists of the unknown, and receiving it again unconsciously as an objective efficient cause, neither mythology nor folklore has to deal. Nor may the last two be confounded as synonymous. 'At the most it can be urged,' says Mr Alfred Nutt (Folklore Journal, vol. ii. 1884, p. 313), 'that folk-belief and comparative mythology touch each other at a great many points, a fact which by no means necessitates the confounding together of the two studies. The relation between them may be stated thus: All, or nearly all, the facts of comparative mythology are to be found in folk-belief in solution; a great many facts of folk-belief are to be found in comparative mythology crystallised. The facts are essentially the same in both cases, but the one study deals with them at one, the other at another stage. It is when they have become at once rigid and systematised by passing through the hands of an hierarchical class, yet capable of development by falling under the artistic influence of the craftsman and the philosophic influence of the thinker, that comparative mythology has to do with them; before then they are but a portion of folk-belief. The two studies thus go hand in hand, and cannot be carried on at all without perpetual reference from one to the other.'
Before the rise of the anthropological school the prevailing method of explaining mythology was based upon the results gained by comparative philology. But long before this attempts of various kinds at its explanation had been made, as allegorisations of physical or ethical truths, and even of biblical narratives; or as rationalisations of historical facts, culminating in the elaborate theory of Euhemerus—to be strangely and ingeniously revived under a new form in our own day by Herbert Spencer. The philological method is now usually associated with the venerated name of Professor Max Müller, but is substantially the same as that taught by the great fathers of modern folklore and almost of modern philology alike, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and carried further by Adalbert Kuhn, Bréal, and many other scholars. The modern science of language early in the present century established the unity and homogeneity of the Aryan speeches, and from this Grimm, Kuhn, Max Müller, De Gubernatis, Dasent, and Cox, finding a vast similarity in the mythologies and popular beliefs of the peoples within this range, passed on to an assertion of an equal unity and homogeneity in their traditional lore. Myths were explained as due to a disease of language—to an assumed excessive figurativeness of phraseology practised by the common ancestors of the Aryan family, the proper meaning of which was lost by later generations, who yet went on using the phrases after the real meaning had been forgotten. Still more, the old terminations expressive of gender became confounded with significations of sex and personality. From what has been said before it will be understood that this explanation is not maintained in the present article, but its further discussion falls to the article MYTHOLOGY.
The modern folklorist, while gratefully accepting the results of the philological school so far as these go, insists on carrying his inquiries infinitely further than they did, and claims that savages and savage customs should be interpreted by themselves, and not by the traditions of peoples with whom they have neither linguistic nor ethnological affinities. The first two generations of folklorists have made a vast contribution to the science from the evidence offered within the Indo-European family; the third has extended its borders to embrace the native Australians, the Zulus, Hottentots, Maoris, South Sea Islanders, Red Indians, and Eskimo; and already the library of folklore and folk-tales actually extends to thousands of volumes.
First in importance of these is still the earliest, the Kinder- und Haus-Märchen (1812-14) of the brothers Grimm. The stories in the first two volumes of this wonderful work were collected during thirteen years from the lips of people living in Hesse and Hanau, many from a cowherd's wife with a special gift of story-telling. The Grimms' method of editing may still be taken as his canon by the collector: 'Our first aim in collecting these stories has been exactness and truth. We have added nothing of our own, have embellished no incident or feature of the story, but have given its substance just as we ourselves received it. It will, of course, be understood that the mode of telling and carrying out of particular details is principally due to us, but we have striven to retain everything that we knew to be characteristic, that in this respect also we might leave the collection the many-sidedness of nature. For the rest, every one engaged on a work of this kind will know that this cannot be looked on as a careless or indifferent method of collection, but that, on the contrary, a care and skill which can only be gained by time are required to distinguish the version of the story which is simpler, purer, and yet more complete in itself, from the falsified one. Whenever we found that varying stories completed each other, and that no contradictory parts had to be cut out before they could be joined together, we have given them as one; but when they differed, we have given the preference to that which was the better, and have kept the other for the notes.' Wilhelm Grimm, writing in 1850, says: 'How unique was our collection when it first appeared, and what a rich harvest has sprung up since! At that time people smiled indulgently when we asserted that thoughts and intuitions were preserved in these stories, the origin of which was to be sought for in the darkness of antiquity. Now this is hardly ever denied. Stories of this kind are sought for with full recognition of their scientific value, and with a dread of altering any part of their contents, whereas formerly they were only regarded as worthless amusements of fancy which might be manipulated at will.' Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1835) is still unequalled in the range of its erudition and in the systematic thoroughness with which the mythology and superstitions of the ancient Teutons are traced back to the dawn of direct evidence and downwards in decay and diminution to the popular tales, traditions, and phrases in which they still unconsciously survive. These two works of Grimm created a school, whose abundant labours later folklorists have entered into, while they have enlarged the horizon of the science, because the stamp of soundness and sufficiency so far as it goes is impressed on all the work of Grimm and his successors, of whom, in Germany, the most eminent were Kuhn, Maunhardt, J. W. Wolf, and W. Schwartz.
Elsewhere, Castrén and Lönnrot devoted themselves to Finnish mythology; Asbjörnsen and Moe collected the Norse popular tales; Schiefner and Jülg, those of the Mongolians and Tartars; Hytén-Cavallius and George Stephens, those of Sweden; Afanasief, those of Russia; Haltrich, of Transylvania; Kreuzwald, of Estonia; Von Hahn and B. Schmidt, of Greece and Albania; Arnason, of Iceland; Rink, of the Eskimo; Bleek, of the Hottentots; Calloway, of the Zulus; J. F. Campbell, of the west Highlands of Scotland. The study of these tales involved the study of the customs imbedded in them, and ere long a plentiful crop of books appeared devoted to the preservation of popular proverbs, customs, rhymed riddles, and the like, among which a place of distinction is due to the Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), by T. Crofton Croker; the Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826) of Robert Chambers; The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and the Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (1849) of Halliwell; and that not merely for the early date of their issue, but for their own intrinsic merits also. The great development of oriental studies that has marked the 19th century has opened up to the West through literary channels those vast treasures of eastern story from which many believe, as will be seen, that all our own traditional folk-tales were originally drawn in ancient ages. Max Müller's essays revealed to Englishmen a new world of undreamt-of affinities, and the combined charm of their literary grace, wide learning, and rare powers of exposition converted every reader to a theory which, as has been seen, is only now being displaced by another with a sounder basis of real philosophy and fact. Since then the study of folklore has become fashionable, indeed almost an article of patriotism, and societies have been formed in most countries to further its study. Of these the most important is still the Folklore Society of England, established in 1878, with a sufficiently wide programme, 'having for its object the preservation and publication of popular traditions, legendary ballads, local proverbial sayings, superstitions and old customs (British and foreign), and all subjects relating to them.' It numbers within its ranks most of the working folklorists of England, and has through its official organ, the Folklore
Record, monthly until its fifth volume, thenceforward quarterly under the new title of the Folklore Journal, made numberless contributions of the first importance to the science; while it has also distributed special treatises to its members so valuable as Professor Comparetti's Researches respecting the Book of Sindibud, Calloway's Zulu Nursery Tales and Religious System of the Amazulu, and an enlarged re-issue of Henderson's Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. The last and Miss Charlotte S. Burne's Shropshire Folklore (1886) are still the best books we have devoted to a particular district of our country. The South African Folklore Journal (1879-80) died untimely in its second volume. There is stronger promise of life in the American Folklore Society, instituted at Cambridge, Mass., early in 1888: (1) For the collection of the fast-vanishing remains of folklore in America, viz.: (a) Relics of old English folklore (ballads, tales, superstitions, dialect, &c.); (b) lore of negroes in the southern states of the Union; (c) lore of the Indian tribes of North America (myths, tales, &c.); (d) lore of French Canada, Mexico, &c. (2) For the study of the general subject, and publication of the results of special studies in this department. Already its journal has amply justified its existence by a series of articles of striking originality and value. In 1878 was founded in France by H. Gaidoz and E. Rolland a folklore journal of the very highest class, the well-known monthly paper Mélusine, which was interrupted after a year, and not resumed till 1884. In the year 1885 was formed the Société des Traditions Populaires, whose organ, the Revue des Traditions Populaires, has appeared monthly since the beginning of 1886. Yet a third French monthly is La Tradition, commenced in 1887. Meantime many special books have been published in France upon departments of folklore, and especially noteworthy are two admirable series of books: (1) Les Littératures Populaires de toutes les Nations: Traditions, légendes, contes, chansons, proverbes, devinettes, superstitions (29 vols. up to 1889), embracing books devoted to Upper and Lower Brittany, to ancient Egypt, Gascony, Normandy, Picardy, the Basque country, Corsica, Alsace, North-west Canada, Mauritius, Asia Minor, and the Vosges district; (2) Collection de Contes et Chansons Populaires (14 vols. up to 1889), including the stories of the Greeks, Portuguese, Albanians, Kabyles, Slavs, Indians, Arabs, French, Senegambians, Corsicans, ancient Provençals, Berbers, and Egyptian Christians. So widely popular have folklore studies become in France that a special congress of its students was held at Paris during the great Exposition of 1889. Of the more eminent folklorists of France may merely be named Gaidoz, Sébillot, Luzel, Bladé, Vinson, Cosquin, Puymaigre, Carnoy, Leger, and Rolland. In Germany again, since the time of Grimm, the continuity of the study has been unbroken, some of the more illustrious in the chain of names being Benfey, Steinthal, Müllenhoff, Rochholz, Simrock, Zingerle, Felix Liebrecht, Reinhold Köhler, Bastian, Veckenstedt, &c. The last founded in 1889 the monthly Zeitschrift für Volkskunde. Benfey's Orient und Occident lived only from 1862 to 1866. Volkskunde, an organ for Dutch folklore, was founded in 1888; Wisl, for Polish, in the same year.
In Italy among the chief names are G. Pitrè and S. Salomone-Marino, joint-directors of the well-known quarterly, Archivio per lo studio delle Tradizioni Popolari (commenced in 1885); the former the author of more than forty folklore books and papers, and the indefatigable editor of the Curiosità Popolari Tradizionali (6 vols. up to 1889), as well as the Biblioteca delle Tradizioni Popolari Siciliane (18 vols. 1870-89), covering with splendid fullness every department of the folklore of Sicily. Two other journals are Giambattista Basile (estab. 1883) and Calabria (1888). Other scholars who have made solid contributions are F. Sabatini (editor of Folklore, a monthly started at Rome, May 1889), Comparetti, Imbriani, Visentini, Bernoni, Laura Gonzenbach, Finamore, Nigra, Prato, Graf, Miss Busk, and Professor Crane. The Canti e Racconti del Popolo Italiano, edited by Comparetti and D'Ancona, already fill eight volumes (1871-89).
In Spain we have the Biblioteca de las Tradiciones Populares Españolas (11 vols. 1884-86), under the intelligent directorship of Antonio Machado y Alvarez. Other publications are the already extinct Boletín Folklorico Español (1885), and El Folklore Andaluz (1883), the Biblioteca Popular de la Asociación d'Excursiones Catalana (3 vols. 1884-86), and the collections of folk-songs or studies on these of R. Marin, Demofilo, Mila y Fontanals, &c. For Portugal the guiding names are Coelho, Braga, Leite de Vasconcellos, and Pedroso; for Belgium and Holland, Von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Gittée, Pol de Mont, and Wilken; for Russia, Afanasief, Khudyakof, Rudchenko, Wesselefsky, Dragomanoff, Buslajev, and Ralston; for the Basques, Cerquand, Vinson, and Wentworth Webster; for the Gypsies, Miklosich, Constantinescu, Paspati, Kopernicki, Wislocki, C. G. Leland, and F. H. Groom; for Hungary, Hermann (Ethnologische Mittheilungen, first vol. 1887-89); for Finland, Krohn; for Roumania, Gaster; for Egypt, ancient and modern, Maspero and Spitta Bey; for the Welsh, Wirt Sikes and Professor Rhys; for India and Persia, the ancient literary collections of stories known as the Hitopadesa, the Panchatantra, the Kalilah wa Dimnah, and the Kathā Sarit Sāgara of Somadeva (Ocean of the Streams of Story, Tawney, 1880), with the special books by Benfey, Rhys Davids, and W. A. Clouston, as well as, for modern and oral stories, the works of Miss Frere, Maive Stokes, Lal Behari Day, Captain Temple (Legends of the Punjab, and in collaboration with Miss Steel, in Wide-awake Stories), Natēsa Sāstrī, and J. H. Knowles. Few general books devoted to a particular country are so satisfactory to the scientific folklorist as Mr Turner's on Samoa, Mr Im Thurn's on British Guiana, and Mr Romilly's on New Guinea. Again, general books which no scientific folklorist can go far without consulting are those of Waitz, Gerland, Bastian, M'Lennan, Bachofen, Morgan, Hearne, Sayce, and Maine, and last, though far from least, Tylor, Lubbock, and Lang.
The Folklore Society's Definition and New Programme.—The vagueness and looseness in signification of the terminology of folklore had become so inconsistent with the enormous advance of knowledge in all its departments that a general desire arose for an exact definition of its scope and functions. With this view a discussion was opened in the pages of the Folklore Journal, to which important contributions were made by Miss Burne, and Messrs Gomme, Sydney Hartland, Machado y Alvarez, Nutt, Wake, and Wheatley, and afterwards by Captain Temple and Mr J. S. Stuart-Glennie. Mr Gomme's definition may now be taken as the working definition of the subject, both as upon the whole the simplest and most convenient offered, and from the fact of its possessing a kind of official sanction as the basis on which the society's Handbook of Folklore, which its author has long been preparing, is to be constructed. A code of questions on its lines has been prepared, similar to that drawn up by Sébillot in 1880, for the purpose of drawing forth such facts as are most helpful to the progress of real science and the formation of sound generalisations. Mr Gomme's definition is—the science which treats of the survivals of archaic beliefs and customs in modern ages. His divisions are: (1) Traditional Narratives: (a) Folk-tales, (b) Hero Tales, (c) Ballads and Songs, (d) Place Legends; (2) Traditional Customs: (a) Local Customs, (b) Festival Customs, (c) Ceremonial Customs, (d) Games; (3) Superstitions and Beliefs: (a) Witchcraft, (b) Astrology, (c) Superstitious Practices and Fancies; (4) Folk-speech: (a) Popular Sayings, (b) Popular Nomenclature, (c) Proverbs, (d) Jingle Rhymes, Riddles, &c.
Folk-songs, Ballads, Counting-out Rhymes, &c.—The reader has already seen the important part that belongs to popular folk-songs or Volkslieder in the scheme of folklore, and he will find this department already treated with some fullness in this encyclopædia under the head of BALLADS. These belong also to literature proper, from their intrinsic poetic content, and from the important influence they have exerted upon more cultured poetry. The patriot whose survey ends with his own shores and the mere man-of-letters alike claim them as falling within their province, in so far as they are national history and literature as well as tradition. Yet these may be correlated with the traditional folk-poetry of other races no less than folk-tales, and we have a splendid example of this in Professor Child's treatment of our English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 parts, 1882-88)—the best edition of a body of popular poetry available to the student.
Much attention has been paid in recent years to children's rhymes and formulas of play, which have been found to be handed down from immemorial antiquity, and to reflect with strange persistency the life and even the religion of long past times. An admirable book devoted to this subject, The Games and Songs of American Children (New York, 1884), by Mr W. W. Newell, has demonstrated the identity of the games and rhymes of American children of to-day not only with those of Old England, but with those of Germany, France, Italy, and Sweden. Those doggerel rhymes of unmeaning jingling words for 'counting out' live with startling persistence, and some idea of their venerable antiquity may be gathered from the history of the so-called 'Anglo-Cymric score,' a corrupted form of the Welsh nmmerals up to twenty, still used in Cumberland for counting sheep, but used by children in many parts of Great Britain, and more strangely still, even in America, where it has often been supposed to be of Indian origin. Of these jingles as many as 800 specimens have been collected by a single editor (H. Carrington Bolton, 1888). Though they have been preserved and transmitted with such persistent conservatism, the genesis of these jingles and counting-out rhymes is so natural that it is quite superfluous to explain them as survivals of ancient superstitious practices of divination by lot.
Folk-tales, their Content, Origin, and Diffusion.—These, the Volksmärchen of the Germans, the Contes populaires of the French, are properly popular tales handed down by oral tradition from remote antiquity. Besides this continuous life they have at various times been lifted into literature, and again reacted in new forms upon purely traditional lore, thereby complicating enormously the problems to be solved. Thus, in the Odyssey and Rig-veda we find distinct traces of veiled and degraded folk-tales; while in the Panchatantra, Hitopadesa, Kalilah wa Dimnah, and Somadeva's Kathā Sarit Sāgara, the Thousand and One Nights, the Gesta Romanorum, the Disciplina Clericalis, the Tredci piacevoli notti (1550) of Straparola, Basile's Pentamerone (1637), the old French fabliaux, and the Decameron of Boccaccio we find many actual folk-tales, more or less disguised by artistic processes of elaboration and refinement. These stories, from whatever sources originally derived, exercised a profound influence upon both eastern and western literature. In 1697 Perrault published his famous Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé, seven stories undoubtedly written down substantially in their traditional shape. They created a fashion, and in imitation of them literary fairy tales were steadily produced throughout the 18th century, as may be seen in the voluminous Cabinet de Fées. But the beginning of real science was, as has been seen, the Kinder- und Haus-Märchen of the brothers Grimm. Since their time thousands of stories have been printed from all quarters of the globe, including Hottentot, Zulu, Swahili, Maori, Annamese, Brazilian, Samoan, Basque, Finnish, Eskimo, and Red Indian examples, as well as others from every province of every country of Europe. It is impossible here to enumerate these more fully; it may be enough to say that the most really valuable collections are still those connected with the names of Asbjörnsen and Moe, Von Hahn, J. F. Campbell, Calloway, Afanasief, Ralston, Pitré, Crane, Krauss, Sébillot, Luzel, Temple, and Cosquin. Many editors would have given greater value to their collections had they possessed an adequate grasp of the real conditions of the problem, and not hampered themselves by the perpetual necessity of finding facts to bolster up some preconceived theory.
The Grimms early found a startling similarity in the substance of these stories, and it only remained for later workers to discover the same identities when the comparison was extended far beyond the range of Aryan affinities. It was found that certain incidents, plots, and characteristics occurred everywhere—as the ill-treatment of the youngest son or daughter, who is eventually successful, and is often the heir; the substitution of a false bride for the true; the abduction of a bride by a youthful hero, and the pursuit by her giant (or supernatural) father, who is outwitted by cunning; a supernatural husband or wife, who is for some cause obliged to abandon a human mate; forbidden chambers, and the disasters that follow from their being opened; descents into the world of gloom, and the danger of eating there; husband and wife forbidden to see each other or name each other's names; the souls of the dead entering animal forms; and the interchange of kindly offices, as if on equal terms, between men and beasts. Again, the incidents are usually unnatural and irrational, completely traversing ordinary human experiences: thus, magical transformations, cannibalism, incest, beasts and men intermarrying, women bringing forth beasts and vice versa, and inanimate things obeying incantations and speaking like men are perfectly familiar occurrences. An attempt was made by Von Hahn, in the introduction to his Griechische und Albanesische Märchen (1864), to construct a scheme for classifying folktales so as to facilitate comparison, and this idea was developed by Baring-Gould, Alfred Nutt, and other folklorists, until at length it was adopted by the Folklore Society (Fourth Report, June 1882). A series of schedules was prepared for systematic tabulation, the following points being especially observed: (1) The fixing of a generic title for each story, and the abolition of the variant titles of the same story which now obtain in different collections; (2) the determination of a common terminology for the study of stories and for each description of story; (3) the determination of a common terminology for each story-incident; (4) the compilation of an index of story-incidents; (5) the tabulation of all stories in printed collections upon a common recognised plan. An admirable example of work on these lines is Captain Temple's Analysis and Survey of Incidents in Wide-awake Stories (1884). The Society has also originated a similar analysis of customs, which promises to be no less fruitful in scientific results.
The time is not yet ripe for any satisfactory answer to the sphinx-like riddle of the origin and manner of diffusion of folk-tales; here it must suffice to state briefly the chief attempts at an answer hitherto offered. The first theory, sanctioned by the august authority of the Grimms, and maintained by Max Müller, Von Hahn, Dasent, and, with more zeal than discretion, by Cox and De Gubernatis, is that popular tales form a part of the mythology of the Aryan peoples, and were carried by them westwards at the primeval dispersion. Some consider them the detritus of the saga and the epic, others again as the original elements by a reconstruction and artistic elaboration of which the epics and sagas were formed. The next contribution of first importance was made by Benfey, in the masterly introduction to his translation of the Panchatantra (1859). His contention was that the popular tales were carried to Europe from India, within historical times, and diffused chiefly through literary channels, such as translations of Eastern story-books and the like. A few special sources were the fables connected with the names of Æsop or of Bidpai; the Panchatantra, especially the parent of tales; and Syntipas—in other versions called the Book of the Seven Wise Masters, more closely connected with novel literature. Among the more important media of communication may be named the wandering and trading Jews, the Moors in Spain, and the Crusaders in their intercourse with the Moslems in the East and with the orientalised Greeks of Byzantium. Dr Gaster (Ilchester Lectures, 1887) makes the old Slavonian religious literature the parent of the medieval and imaginative apocryphal literature, the romances and epics, and the didactic fables; and argues that oral folklore arose out of this written literature, the traces of which may be found in saga and romance, in religious and epic poems, in riddles and tales, and even in popular beliefs, customs, and habits. The ultimate common origin of all these was the East, of which not only the religion but the profane literature reached the Slavonic peoples through the medium of Byzantium—the open gateway of the East. He postulates a previous literary period, and affirms that not the legends alone, as now known to us, but also the fairy-tales, and even amulets and spells were almost unknown in Europe before the 10th century. Mr Clouston and M. Cosquin follow Benfey with greater or less modifications; and Mr F. Hindes Groom has made the striking suggestion (The National Review, July 1888) that one main channel of communication may well have been that ubiquitous, wandering, and specially gifted oriental race, the Gypsies. M. Cosquin argues that if the Aryan race before its dispersion preserved the myths only in their earliest germinal form, after the separate branches had lost touch of one another it would have been impossible that the final form of the myths—the household tales as we have them now—would have so closely resembled each other as they do. While admitting that the same ideas and situations are afloat wherever men exist at the same stage of culture, he refuses to allow that independent parallel or identical combinations are possible without conscious borrowing. What makes a story, properly speaking, is not the ideas which enter into it, such as speaking beasts, transformations, objects of magic, and the like, but rather the combination of the same, which is usually a thing entirely arbitrary; and it is impossible to believe, according to M. Cosquin, that identical successions and combinations of incidents can occur without transmission by some means or other. He urges that the combinations in European folk-tales are Indian, nay, Buddhist; consequently they must have been transmitted within the historical period from India.
The answer to this theory is to point to the vast accumulation of equally startling identities discovered among races far removed geographically from contact with India. It contradicts that homogeneity of human inventiveness which is found paralleled in the similar development of the arts of life everywhere. We are not told why stories can only be produced in India, and how Indian stories could possibly have penetrated within the period to the Zulus and the Iroquois. No doubt there has been some such borrowing as M. Cosquin's theory demands; and, indeed, we know of diverse currents which have carried in all directions several written collections; but the negation on which the theory rests will not support the weight it has to bear. Besides, the flank of M. Cosquin's position has been turned by the discovery that popular tales resembling those of India and Europe are found on papyri of ancient Egypt, dating 1400 years before our era. Sir Richard Burton and others attribute the origin of all human culture to Egypt, but of course it might here be said that ideas and combinations of ideas may have been carried from Egypt to India, which there ripened into fruit, and were scores of generations afterwards carried back again to the west. Mr Stuart Glennie makes 'the Arkhadian White Races,' represented by the ancient Egyptians and Akkadians of Chaldea, the originators of human civilisation. They possessed common traditions, as of a Paradise and a Deluge, and were succeeded about 3000 B.C. by the Semites and about 500 B.C. by the Aryans. The grosser myths found among the white races are not survivals of their own primitive culture, but rather of the superstitions of the lower races with whom the white races came into contact; while myths found among the lower races are merely rude misconstructions of the symbolisms of the higher races that subdued them. This theory is ingenious and interesting, but unfortunately its large postulates rest on much too feeble a basis of fact.
The most satisfactory theory hitherto offered—that of Mr Lang and the anthropological school—has already been stated substantially in the foregoing pages. It makes the spontaneous generation of similar ideas, incidents, and arrangements of these, under the same physical conditions, and at parallel levels in culture, the most important element in the manufacture of folk-tales. Popular tales are thus 'kaleidoscopic arrangements of comparatively few situations and incidents, which again are naturally devised by the early fancy.' At the same time it admits that the process of borrowing has also gone on, and that stories once invented may have been carried from people to people by daring merchants, captured alien wives, and slaves bought or carried off by violence. As a theory it confirms rather than contradicts the known facts of human psychology, and it traverses no hopeless difficulties of geography or history.
See the articles on ANIMISM, BALLADS, BEAST-FABLES, CHAP-BOOKS, DEMONOLOGY, DIVINATION, FABLES, FABLEAUX, FAMILY, MYTHOLOGY, WITCHCRAFT, as well as on the names of the more important writers. Some of the more important books have been already mentioned; among general books may be named Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte (1860); W. K. Kelly, Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folklore (1863), antiquated, but still suggestive; Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde (1879); Lang, Custom and Myth (1884), his preface to Mrs Hunt's trans. of Grimm (1884) and to his edition of Perrault (1888); W. A. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions (1887); Gustav Meyer's Essays und Studien (1885); and Puymaigre, Folklore (1885).