Europa's Fairy Book

Europa's Fairy Book

Ever since the Brothers Grimm in 1812 made for the first time a fairly complete collection of the folk-tales of a definite local or national area in Europe, the resemblance of many of these tales, not alone in isolated incidents but in continuous plots, has struck inquirers into these delightful little novels for children, as the Italians call them (Novelline). Wilhelm Grimm, in the comparative notes which he added to successive editions of the Mhrchen up to 1859, drew attention to many of these parallels and especially emphasized the resemblances of different incidents to similar ones in the Teutonic myths and sagas which he and his brother were investigating. Indeed it may be said that the very considerable amount of attention that was paid to the collection of folk tales throughout Europe for the half century between 1840 and 1890 was due to the hope that they would throw some light upon the origins of mythology. The stories and incidents common to all the European field were thought likely to be original mythopic productions of the Indo-European peoples just in the same manner as the common roots of the various Aryan languages indicated their original linguistic store. In 1864 J. G. von Hahn, Austrian Consul for Eastern Greece, in the introduction to his collection of Greek and Albanian folk tales, made the first attempt to bring together in systematic form this common story-store of Europe and gave an analysis of forty folk-tale and saga "formul," which outlined the plots of the stories found scattered[216] through the German, Greek, Italian, Servian, Roumanian, Lithuanian, and Indian myth and folk-tale areas. These formul were translated and adapted by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould in an appendix to Henderson's Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England (London, 1866), and he expanded them into fifty-two formul. Those were the days when Max Mller's solar and lunar explanations of myths were in the ascendant and Mr. Baring-Gould applied his views to the explanation of folk tales. I have myself expanded Hahn's and Baring-Gould's formul into a list of seventy-two given in the English Folk-Lore Society's Hand-Book of Folk-Lore, London, 1891 (repeated in the second edition, 1912). Meanwhile the erudition of Theodor Benfey, in his introduction to the Indian story book, Pantschatantra (Leipzig, 1859), had suggested another explanation of the similarities of European folk-tales. For many of the incidents and several of the complete tales Benfey showed Indian parallels, and suggested that the stories had originated in India and had been transferred by oral tradition to the different countries of Europe. This entirely undermined the mythological theories of the Grimms and Max Mller and considerably reduced the importance of folk tales as throwing light upon the primitive psychology of the Aryan peoples. Benfey's researches were followed up by E. Cosquin who, in the elaborate notes to his Contes de Lorraine, Paris, 1886, largely increased the evidence both for the common European popularity of many of the tales and incidents as well as for the parallels to be found in Oriental collections. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 26019
Author: Jacobs, Joseph
Release Date: Jul 10, 2008
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Illustrator: Batten, John Dickson, 1860-1932