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By Root 1950 0

diverse characters into a few types, selected the incidents that would most strikingly illustrate what heroes and heroines, witches, enchanters, giants and dwarfs, the haughty, the envious and the unfaithful were capable of. As in work long thought about and lived with, the stories have something which the most brilliant improvisations are without—depth, fullness, a mysterious relation of parts. We can think upon them, reflect over them. How it can come about that a king’s daughter can be made to marry a beggarly fiddler, sit at a street corner selling crockery, be sent back as a kitchen maid to her father’s castle to remain there unknown until the man she rejected in her haughtiness comes to claim her, and how it all can be intelligible, we do not know. But we believe in the movement to the king’s castle and back to the king’s castle through the hut in the forest and the crockery stall in the street and admit that her adversity has made the king’s daughter a more human person.

We go to our writers for distraction or relaxation while still keeping hold on our daily affairs, but the people who listened to him or to her went to the storyteller for release, leaving their daily affairs outside the house door. They felt, as we do not feel, the rhythm that succeeds the rhythm of the day. Compulsiveness gave place to acquiescence. Outside, the geese, the goats, the sheep and the cattle were folded; within, the cat purred, the dog lay in a corner, and on a beam at the opening of the roof the hens roosted. Elders and youngsters sat round the fire or beside the stove; the candle or dim oil lamp made shadows on the walls; a woman spun a thread. Out of the reverie such settled and familiar things held came the storyteller’s utterance, familiar, too, in repetition of traditions that were the people’s own like the table, the bench, the grandmother’s chair. What was told was news of persons they knew—the queen’s daughter who herded geese, the king’s son whose quest was for nothing less than the Water of Life, the miller’s youngest son who would show he had deeper wisdom than his elder, clever brothers.

Heroes and heroines moved towards and gained an absolute worth in life; after subjection they became wise kings and beloved queens and lived happy ever afterwards. Elders and youngsters heard about people who were as beautiful, wise and fortunate as human beings could be, who had envious, unfaithful, unworthily privileged fellows, who knew giants and dwarfs who threatened or helped them, who had birds or animals for friends.

They had belief in magic, witchcraft, transformation; they had no doubt about the efficacy of spells, charms, incantations; many incidents in what they related came from savage conceptions. But in their stories human behavior is always in accordance with a fine ideal. A real faith in human powers is present. Happiness is possible and compensation is due to those who have been wronged. Envy and unfaithfulness are condemned and punished. There is no concern with what is negative. Wicked people keep on their course of badness but they are not bored. Decent people may be lonely but they are never despondent. In the traditional stories—at least in the stories the Brothers Grimm brought us—revenge and cruelty for its own sake have no place.

For stories in which a character may be put in a barrel studded with nails and hauled by a horse through a town until she is dead, it is odd to claim a humane quality. But notice that such punishments are infrequent; that those condemned have broken trust and have been unfaithful and oppressive. Even so, the storytellers are troubled about it and have the criminal herself pronounce the doom. We hear of queens unjustly accused being condemned to be burned to death. But the burning never eventuates. In the world that is opened to us by the Brothers Grimm good-will predominates: the hero is characterized by courtesy as the heroine by gentleness.

We have mentioned a name that is august in the world of traditional stories: the Brothers Grimm. Their “Household Tales,” almost the first, have