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By Root 2146 0

and Syryenians, Gipsies and Hungarians, Turks, Kasan-Tatars, Chuvash and Bashkirs, Kalmuks, Buryats, Voguls and Ostyaks, Yakuts, Siberian Tatars, the peoples of the Caucasus, the populations of India and Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria, the Arabian desert, Tibet, Turkestan, Java and Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes, the Philippines, Burma, Siam, Annam, China, Korea and Japan, Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, the continent of Africa, South, Middle and North America. Still unpublished archives accumulate in provincial, national, and international institutes. Where there was a lack, there is now such abundance that the problem is how to deal with it, how to get the mind around it, and what to think.

In this ocean of story, a number of kinds of narrative are encompassed. Many of the collections of so-called primitive materials include Myths; that is to say, religious recitations conceived as symbolic of the play of Eternity in Time. These are rehearsed, not for diversion, but for the spiritual welfare of the individual or community. Legends also appear; i.e. reviews of a traditional history (or of episodes from such a history) so rendered as to permit mythological symbolism to inform human event and circumstance. Whereas myths present in pictorial form cosmogonic and ontological intuitions, legends refer to the more immediate life and setting of the given society.* Something of the religious power of myth may be regarded as effective in legend, in which case, the native narrator must be careful concerning the circumstances of his recitation, lest the power break astray. Myths and legends may furnish entertainment incidentally, but they are essentially tutorial.

Tales, on the other hand, are frankly pastime: fireside tales, winternights’ tales, nursery tales, coffee-house tales, sailor yarns, pilgrimage and caravan tales to pass the endless nights and days. The most ancient written records and the most primitive tribal circles attest alike to man’s hunger for the good story. And every kind of thing has served. Myths and legends of an earlier period, now discredited or no longer understood, their former power broken (yet still potent to charm), have supplied much of the raw material for what now passes simply as Animal Tale, Fairy Tale, and Heroic or Romantic Adventure. The giants, and gnomes of the Germans, the “little people” of the Irish, the dragons, knights, and ladies of Arthurian Romance, were once the gods and demons of the Green Isle and the European continent. Similarly, the divinities of the primitive Arabians appear as Jinn in the story-world of Islam. Tales of such origin are regarded with differing degrees of seriousness by the various people who recount them; and they can be received by the sundry members of the audience, severally, with superstitious awe, nostalgia for the days of belief, ironic amusement, or simple delight in the marvels of imagination and intricacies of plot. But no matter what the atmosphere of belief, the stories, in so far as they now are “Tales,” are composed primarily for amusement. They are reshaped in terms of dramatic contrast, narrative suspense, repetition,* and resolution.

Certain characteristic opening and closing formulas set apart from the common world the timeless, placeless realm of faërie: “Once upon a time”; “In the days of good King Arthur”; “A thousand years ago tomorrow”; “Long, long ago, when Brahmadatta was the ruler of Benares”—“And so they lived happily ever after”; “That’s all”; “A mouse did run, the story is done”; “So there they remain, happy and contented, while we stand barefoot as packasses and lick our teeth”; “Bo bow bended, my story’s ended; if you don’t like it, you may mend it.” A handsome conclusion is attributed to the Zanzibar Swahili: “If the story was beautiful, the beauty belongs to us all; if it was bad, the fault is mine only, who told it.” †

Prose is the normal vehicle of story, but at critical points little rhymes commonly appear:

Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall,

Who in this land is the fairest of all?

Turn back, turn back, young