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By Root 5242 0

startling thing was that the assiduous collectors of folktales were now coming across versions of the same basic story cropping up from places culturally and geographically so far apart that it no longer seemed possible that such stories could have sprung from just one original source. It was one thing for variants of, say, the `Cinderella story' to be found all over Europe, from Serbia to the Shetlands, from Russia to Spain; at least all these countries did share some common cultural and linguistic traditions. But when the same story was found, in different guises, in China, in Africa and among the North American Indians, it was clear that its ubiquity could no longer be explained simply in terms of cultural contact, or of a common historical source, however archaic.

So where did the stories come from? One response of many of these late-nineteenth century writers was to suggest that somehow all these stories, myths and legends were simply attempts to explain and to dramatise natural phenomena, familiar to all mankind. One popular theory, particularly associated with the philologist Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) was that stories of the god who dies and is reborn were `solar myths, describing the setting and rising of the sun. It was suggested that the widespread folktales in which a heroine is eaten by a monster must have had something to do with the sun being `eaten' by the moon in the course of an eclipse. Others held that the tales of `dragons' and `monsters' found all over the world originated in the discovery of dinosaur bones. But such theories were wholly inadequate to explain the astonishing universality, not just of the stories themselves, but often of the tiny details by which they were expressed - even though a more sophisticated version of these `metaphors for nature' arguments has been advanced in more recent times by writers like the Canadian academic Northrop Frye, who attempted in his Anatomy of Criticism to relate the underlying forms of Tragedy and Comedy to the theme of `death and resurrection' in the natural cycle of the year (Winter giving way to Spring, and so forth).

A second response, particularly popular among the experts on folklore themselves, has been to say in effect that there is simply no satisfactory, all-embracing explanation for the ubiquity of certain story-forms. Since Victorian times, the accumulation of parallels and links between the folk tales of hundreds of different cultures has turned into a major academic industry. Well over 1000 versions have been collected of the `Cinderella story alone. The `literature, as scholars call it, now abounds in whole libraries - full of such items as `Three Hundred and Forty Five Variants of Cinderalla, Catskin and Cap O'Rushes, abstracted and tabulated, with discussion of Mediaeval Analogues and Notes'; or `Tom-Tit-Tot: A Comparative Essay on Aarne-Thompson Type 500 - The Name of the Helper'; or 'A New Classification of the Fundamental Version of the Tar Baby Story on the basis of Two Hundred and Sixty Seven Versions'. Certainly the folklorists have established that the spreading of tales through cultural contact has been a far more complex process through history than might at first seem conceivable. Stories told to the Grimm brothers by German peasants in the early nineteenth century, for instance, have been traced back to Indian sources dating from well over a thousand years before, having entered Europe via trading routes or at the time of the Crusades, and been endlessly reworked by countless different storytellers in between. Stories collected in Africa and Asia in modern times as `indigenous folk tales' have been traced back in turn to the Grimms, having been passed on by missionaries and dressed up in local clothing.

But one consequence of uncovering such complexities is that these busy collectors have been so overwhelmed by the Everest of material they have accumulated that they have finally despaired of finding any theory that actually might make sense of it all: that might discern a common ground in human psychology to account not