The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (Pantheon Books) - Jacob Grimm [370]
* In German criticism the terms Sage and Legende are commonly distinguished. Sage designates any little, local story, associated with this or that specific hill or grove, pond or river. By a people inhabiting a spirit-haunted and memory-haunted landscape, the Sage is conceived to be a recitation of fact. The Sage may be developed into the Kunstsage, or “Literary Saga.” Legende, on the other hand, denotes the religious tale associated with some specific shrine or relic. It is a later and more elaborate form than the Sage. The “Children’s Legends” of the Grimm collection bring fairytale motifs to play around elements of Christian belief.—But the term “Legend,” as used above, is more general. It includes both Sage and Legende, but also the materials of Chronicle and Epic.
* Throughout the Old World, repetition is commonly in threes; in America, fours.
† From Bolte and Polívka, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 34.
* The literary folk tale can be rendered in either verse or prose. In eighteenth century Germany, Johann Musäus (1735–1787) composed in prose, Christoph Wieland (1735–1813) in verse. The huge Hindu collection of the Kathāsaritsāgara, “Ocean of the Streams of Story” (c. 1063–1081), is entirely in verse; the Arabian Thousand Nights and One Night (eleventh to fifteenth centuries) is in prose.
* Some of the Jātakas, or tales of the early lives of the Buddha, are fables that half pretend to be little legends. Buddhist and Jain fables teach religious lore, Aesop and the Brahminical Panchatantra teach the wisdom of life.
† Antti Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, Folklore Fellows Communications, Vol. I, No. 3, Helsinki, 1911. Johannes Bolte notes that the following are missing from Aarne’s listing: Animal Tales: 30. 80. 173. 190.—Ordinary Folk Tales: 39. 43. 78. 109. 117. 137. 150. 154. 175. 177. 180. 182. 184. 196. 201–205. 208–210.—Jokes and Anecdotes: 77. 95. 119. 131. 162. 170. 200. (Bolte and Polívka, op. cit., Vol. IV, pp. 467–470).
‡ Albert Wesselski (Versuch einer Theorie des Märchens, 1931, pp. 12, 32, etc.) is of the opinion that the term Märchen should be reserved for this category, II. A.
THREE
The History of the Tales
THE PATTERNS of the folk tale are much the same throughout the world. This circumstance has given rise to a long and intricate learned discussion.* By and large, it is now fairly agreed that the general continuity, and an occasional correspondence to the detail, can be referred to the psychological unity of the human species, but that over this ground a profuse and continuous passing along of tales from mouth to ear—and by book—has been taking place, not for centuries only, but millenniums, and over immense reaches of the globe. Hence the folklore of each area must be studied for its peculiar history. Every story—every motif, in fact—has had its adventurous career.
The Grimm brothers regarded European folklore as the detritus of Old Germanic belief: the myths of ancient time had disintegrated, first into heroic legend and romance, last into these charming treasures of the nursery. But in 1859, the year of Wilhelm’s death, a Sanskrit scholar, Theodor Benfey, demonstrated that a great portion of the lore of Europe had come, through Arabic, Hebrew and Latin translations, directly from India—and this as late as the thirteenth century A.D.† Since Benfey’s time, the evidence for a late, polygenetic development of the folk tale of Christian Europe has become abundant and detailed.
The scholars of the English Anthropological School at the close of the nineteenth century (E. B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, E. S. Hartland, and others), believed that the irrational elements of fairylore were grounded in savage superstition. Totemism, cannibalism, taboo, and the external soul, they discovered on every page. But today it is clear that such irrationalities are as familiar to