SAVAGE IDEAS.
Sagas and _Märchen_--Fairy Tales based upon ideas familiar to
savages--The Doctrine of Spirits--The Doctrine of
Transformation--Totemism--Death--Witchcraft--The predominance of
imagination over reason in savages--Method of the inquiry.
Fairy Tales, as defined in the previous chapter, fall under two heads.
Under the first we may place all those stories which relate to definite
supernatural beings, or definite orders of supernatural beings, held
really to exist, and the scenes of which are usually laid in some
specified locality. Stories belonging to this class do not necessarily,
however, deal with the supernatural. Often they are told of historical
heroes, or persons believed to have once lived. For instance, the
legends of Lady Godiva and Whittington and his Cat, which, however
improbable, contain nothing of the supernatural, must be reckoned under
this head equally with the story of the Luck of Edenhall, or the Maori
tale of the Rending asunder of Heaven and Earth. In other words, this
class is by no means confined to Fairy Tales, but includes all stories
which are, or at all events have been up to recent years, and in the
form in which they come to us, looked upon as narratives of actual
occurrences. They are called _Sagas_. The other class of tales consists
of such as are told simply for amusement, like Jack and the Beanstalk,
Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Puss in Boots. They may embody
incidents believed in other countries, or in other stages of
civilization, to be true in fact; but in the form in which we have them
this belief has long since been dropped. In general, the reins are
thrown upon the neck of the imagination; and, marvellous though the
story be, it cannot fail to find acceptance, because nobody asserts that
its events ever took place, and nobody desires to bring down its flights
to the level either of logic or experience. Unlike the saga, it binds
the conscience neither of teller nor of listener; its hero or heroine
has no historical name or fame, either national or local; and being
untrammelled either by history or probability, the one condition the tale
is expected to fulfil is to end happily. Stories of this class are
technically called _Märchen_: we have no better English name for them
than _Nursery Tales_.
If we inquire which of these two species of tales is the earlier in the
history of culture, it seems that the priority must be given to sagas.
The matter, indeed, is not quite free from doubt, because low down in
the scale of civilization, as among the Ainos of Japan, stories are told
which appear to be no more than _märchen_; and because, on the other
hand, it is at all times easier, even for experienced collectors, to
obtain sagas than _märchen_. But among the lower races, a vastly
preponderating number of tales recorded by Europeans who have lived with
them on the terms of the greatest intimacy is told to account for the
phenomena of nature, or their own history and organization. From many
savage peoples we have no other stories at all; and it is not uncommon
to find narratives at bottom identical with some of these told as
_märchen_ among nations that have reached a higher plane. In these
cases, at all events, it looks as if the tales, or tales from which they
had been derived, had been originally believed as true, and, having
ceased to be thus received, had continued to be repeated, in a shape
more or less altered, for mere amusement. If we may venture to affirm
this and to generalize from such cases, this is the way in which
_märchen_ have arisen.
But sagas are not only perhaps the most ancient of tales, they are
certainly the most persistent. By their attachment to places and to
persons, a religious sanction is frequently given to them, a local and
national pride is commonly felt in preserving them. Thus they are
remembered when nursery tales are forgotten; they are more easily
communicated to strangers; they find their way into literature and so
are rendered imperishable.
Fairy Tales of both these classes are compounded of incidents which are
the common property of many nations, and not a few whereof are known all
over the habitable globe. In some instances the whole plot, a more or
less intricate one, is found among races the most diverse in
civilization and character. Where the plot is intricate, or contains
elements of a kind unlikely to have originated independently, we may be
justified in suspecting diffusion from one centre. Then it is that the
history and circumstances of a nation become important factors in the
inquiry; and upon the purity of blood and the isolation from
neighbouring races may depend our decision as to the original or
derivative character of such a tradition. Sometimes the passage of a
story from one country to another can be proved by literary evidence.
This is markedly the case with Apologues and Facetious Tales, two
classes of traditions which do not come within the purview of the
present work. But the story has then passed beyond the traditional
stage, or else such proof could not be given. In tracing the history of
a folk-tale which has entered into literature, the problem is to
ascertain how far the literary variations we meet with may have been
influenced by pre-existing traditional tales formed upon similar lines.
In general, however, it may be safely said of Fairy Tales (with which we
are more immediately concerned) that the argument in favour of their
propagation from a single centre lacks support. The incidents of which
they are composed are based upon ideas not peculiar to any one people,
ideas familiar to savages everywhere, and only slowly modified and
transformed as savagery gives way to barbarism, and barbarism to modern
civilization and scientific knowledge of the material phenomena of the
universe. The ideas referred to are expressed by races in the lower
culture both in belief and in custom. And many of the tales which now
amuse our children appear to have grown out of myths believed in the
most matter-of-fact way by our remote forefathers; while others enshrine
relics of long-forgotten customs and modes of tribal organization.
There is one habit of thought familiar to savage tribes that to us,
trained through long centuries of progressive knowledge, seems in the
highest degree absurd and even incomprehensible. As a matter of
every-day practice we cannot, if we would, go back to that infantine
state of mind which regards not only our fellow men and women, but all
objects animate and inanimate around us, as instinct with a
consciousness, a personality akin to our own. This, however, is the
savage philosophy of things. To a large proportion of human beings at
the present day beasts and birds, trees and plants, the sea, the
mountains, the wind, the sun, the moon, the clouds and the stars, day
and night, the heaven and the earth, are alive and possessed of the
passions and the cunning and the will they feel within themselves. The
only difference is that these things are vastly cleverer and more
powerful than men. Hence they are to be dreaded, to be appeased--if
possible, to be outwitted--even, sometimes, to be punished. We may
observe this childish habit of thought in our nurseries to-day when one
of our little ones accidentally runs against the table, and forthwith
turns round to beat the senseless wood as if it had voluntarily and
maliciously caused his pain; or when another, looking wistfully out of
window, adjures the rain in the old rhyme:
"Rain, rain, go away!
Come again another day!"
Poets, too, and orators in their loftiest moods revert to language and
modes of expression which have no meaning apart from this belief in the
conscious animation of every object in the world. They may move us for
the moment by their utterances; but we never take their raptures
literally. To the savage, however, it is no figure of speech to call
upon the sun to behold some great deed, or to declare that the moon
hides her face; to assert that the ocean smiles, or that the river
swells with rage, and overwhelms a wayfarer who is crossing it, or an
unsuspecting village on its banks. These phrases for him fit the facts
of nature as closely as those which record that the man eats or the boy
runs. Nay, what would seem incredible to him would be to deny that the
sun can see or the moon hide her face, the ocean smile or the river
become enraged. Conscious personality and human emotions are visible to
him everywhere and in all things.
It matters not to the savage that human form and speech are absent.
These are not necessary, or, if they are, they can be assumed either at
will or under certain conditions. For one of the consequences, or at
least one of the accompaniments, of this stage of thought is the belief
in change of form without loss of individual identity. The bear whom the
savage meets in the woods is too cunning to appear and do battle with
him as a man; but he could if he chose. The stars were once men and
women. Sun and moon, the wind and the waters, perform all the functions
of living beings: they speak, they eat, they marry and have children.
Rocks and trees are not always as immovable as they appear: sometimes
they are to be seen as beasts or men, whose shapes they still, it may
be, dimly retain.
It follows that peoples in this stage of thought cannot have, in theory
at all events, the repugnance to a sexual union between man and the
lower animals with which religious training and the growth of
civilization have impressed all the higher races. Such peoples admit
the possibility of a marriage wherein one party may be human and the
other an animal of a different species, or even a tree or plant. If they
do not regard it as an event which can take place in their own time and
neighbourhood, it does not seem entirely incredible as an event of the
past; and sometimes customs are preserved on into a higher degree of
culture--such as that of wedding, for special purposes, a man to a
tree--unmistakably bespeaking former, if not present, beliefs. Moreover,
tribes in the stage of thought here described, hold themselves to be
actually descended from material objects often the most diverse from
human form. These are not only animals (beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles,
and even insects) or vegetables, but occasionally the sun, the sea, the
earth, and other things unendowed with life. Such mythic ancestors are
worshipped as divine. This superstition is called _Totemism_, and the
mythic ancestor is known as the _Totem_. As a people passes gradually
into a higher stage of culture, greater stress is constantly laid on the
human qualities of the Totem, until it becomes at length an
anthropomorphic god. To such deity the object previously reverenced as a
Totem is attached, and a new and modified legend grows up to account for
the connection.
The belief in metamorphosis involves opinions on the subject of death
which are worth a moment's pause. Death is a problem to all men, to the
savage as to the most civilized. Least of any can the savage look upon
it as extinction. He emphatically believes that he has something within
him that survives the dissolution of his outward frame. This is his
spirit, the seat of his consciousness, his real self. As he himself has
a spirit, so every object in the world has a spirit. He peoples the
universe, as he knows it, with spirits akin to his own. It is to their
spirits that all the varied objects around him, all the phenomena
observable by day or by night, owe the consciousness, the personality, I
have already tried to describe. These spirits are separable from the
material form with which they are clad. When the savage sleeps, his
spirit goes forth upon various adventures. These adventures he remembers
as dreams; but they are as veritable as his waking deeds; and he awakes
when his spirit returns to him. In his dreams he sees his friends, his
foes; he kills imaginary bears and venison. He knows therefore that
other men's spirits travel while their bodies sleep and undergo
adventures like his own, and in company often with his spirit. He knows
that the spirits of wild animals range abroad and encounter his spirit.
What is death but the spirit going forth to return no more? Rocks and
rivers perhaps cannot die, or at least their life immeasurably exceeds
that of men. But the trees of the forest may, for he can cut them down
and burn them. Yet, inasmuch as it is the nature of a body to have an
indwelling spirit, death--the permanent severing of body and
spirit--cannot occur naturally: it must be due to the machination of
some enemy, by violence, by poison, or by sorcery.
The spirit that has gone forth for ever is not, by quitting its bodily
tenement, deprived of power offensive and defensive. It is frequently
impelled by hostile motives to injure those yet in the flesh; and it
must, therefore, be appeased, or deceived, or driven away. This is the
end and aim of funeral rites: this is the meaning of many periodical
ceremonies in which the whole tribe takes part. For the same reason,
when the hunter slays a powerful animal, he apologizes and lays the
blame on his arrows or his spear, or on some one else. For the same
reason the woodman, when he cuts down a tree, asks permission to do so
and offers sacrifices, and he provides a green sprig to stick into the
stump as soon as the tree falls, that it may be a new home for the
spirit thus dislodged. For since the spirit is neither slain, nor
deprived of power, by destruction of the body, or by severance from the
body, it may find another to dwell in. Spirits of dead men, like other
spirits, may assume fresh bodies, new forms, and forms not necessarily
human. A favourite form is that of a snake: it was as a snake that the
spirit of Anchises appeared and accepted the offerings made by his pious
son. In their new forms the spirits of the dead are sometimes, as in
this case, kindly, at other times malicious, but always to be treated
with respect, always to be conciliated; for their power is great. They
can in their turn cause disease, misfortune, death.
Another characteristic of the mental condition I am describing must not
be omitted. Connection of thought, even though purely fortuitous, is
taken to indicate actual connection of the things represented in
thought. This connection is, of course, often founded on association of
time or place, and once formed it is not easily broken. For example, any
object once belonging to a man recalls the thought of him. The
connection between him and that object is therefore looked upon as still
existing, and he may be affected by the conduct shown towards it. This
applies with special force to such objects as articles of clothing, and
still more to footprints and to spittle, hair, nail-parings and
excrement. Injury to these with malicious intent will hurt him from whom
they are derived. In the same way a personal name is looked upon as
inseparable from its owner; and savages are frequently careful to guard
the knowledge of their true names from others, being content to be
addressed and spoken of by a nickname, or a substituted epithet. The
reason of this is that the knowledge of another's name confers power
over that other: it is as though he, or at least an essential part of
him, were in the possession of the person who had obtained the knowledge
of his name. It is perhaps not an unfair deduction from the same
premises that endows an image with the properties of its prototype--nay,
identifies it with its prototype. This leads on the one hand to
idol-worship, and on the other hand to the rites of witchcraft wherein
the wizard is said to make a figure of a man, call it by his name, and
then transfix it with nails or thorns, or burn it, with the object of
causing pain and ultimately death to the person represented. Nor is a
very different process of thought discernible in the belief that by
eating human or other flesh the spirit (or at any rate some of the
spiritual qualities) formerly animating it can be transferred to the
eater. So a brave enemy is devoured in the hope of acquiring his
bravery; and a pregnant woman is denied the flesh of hares and other
animals whose qualities it is undesirable her children should have.
To minds guiltless of inductive reasoning an accidental coincidence is a
sure proof of cause and effect. Travellers' tales are full of examples
of misfortunes quite beyond foresight or control, but attributed by the
savages among whom the narrators have sojourned to some perfectly
innocent act on their part, or merely to their presence, or to some
strange article of their equipment. Occasionally the anger of the gods
is aroused by these things; and missionaries, in particular, have
suffered much on this account. But sometimes a more direct causation is
imagined, though it is probably not always easy to distinguish the two
cases. Omens also are founded upon accidental coincidences. The most
lively imagination may fail to trace cause and effect between the
meeting of a magpie at setting out and a fruitless errand following, or
between a certain condition of the entrails of an animal sacrificed and
a victory or defeat thereafter. But the imagination is not to be beaten
thus. If the magpie did not cause failure, at all events it foretold it;
and the look of the entrails was an omen of the gain or loss of the
battle.
Again, a merely fanciful resemblance is a sufficient association to
establish actual connection. Why do the Bushmen kindle great fires in
time of drought, if not because of the similarity in appearance between
smoke and rain-clouds? Such resemblances, to give a familiar instance,
have fastened on certain rocks and stones many legends of transformation
in conformity with the belief already discussed; and they account for a
vast variety of symbolism in the rites and ceremonies of nations all
over the world.
The topic is well nigh endless; but enough has been said to enable the
reader to see how widely pervasive in human affairs is the belief in
real connection founded on nothing more substantial than association of
thought, however occasioned. Nothing, indeed, is too absurd for this
belief. It is one of the most fruitful causes of superstition; and it
only disappears very gradually from the higher civilization as the
reasoning powers become more and more highly trained. In magic, or
witchcraft, we find it developed into a system, with professional
ministers and well-established rules. By these rules its ministers
declare themselves able to perform all the wonders of transformation
referred to above, to command spirits, to bring distant persons and
things into their immediate presence, to inflict injury and death upon
whom they please, to bestow wealth and happiness, and to foretell the
future. The terror they have thus inspired, and the horrors wrought
under the influence of that terror, form one of the saddest chapters of
history.[14]
I do not of course pretend that the foregoing is a complete account of
the mental processes of savage peoples. Still less have I attempted to
trace the history of the various characteristics mentioned, or to show
the order of their evolution. To attempt either of these things would
be beyond the scope of the present work. I have simply enumerated a few
of the elements in the psychology of men in a low state of culture which
it is needful to bear in mind in order to understand the stories we are
about to examine. In those stories we shall find many impossibilities,
many absurdities and many traces of customs repulsive to our modes of
thought and foreign to our manners. The explanation is to be obtained,
not by speculations based on far-fetched metaphors supposed to have
existed in the speech of early races, nor in philological puzzles, but
by soberly inquiring into the facts of barbarian and savage life and
into the psychological phenomena of which the facts are the outcome. The
evidence of these facts and phenomena is to be found scattered up and
down the pages of writers of every age, creed and country. On hardly any
subject have men of such different degrees of learning, such various and
opposite prejudices, left us their testimony--testimony from the nature
of the subject more than ordinarily liable to be affected by prejudice,
and by the limitations of each witness's powers of observation and
opportunities of ascertaining the truth. But after all deductions for
prejudice, mistake, inaccuracy and every other shortcoming, there is
left a strong, an invincible consensus of testimony, honest, independent
and full of undesigned corroborations, to the development of the mind of
all races in the lower culture along the lines here indicated. Nay,
more; the numerous remains of archaic institutions, as well as of
beliefs among the most advanced nations, prove that they too have passed
through the very same stages in which we find the most backward still
lingering--stages which the less enlightened classes even of our own
countrymen at the present day are loth to quit. And the further we
penetrate in these investigations, the more frequent and striking are
the coincidences between the mental phenomena already described which
are still manifested by savage peoples, and those of which the evidence
has not yet disappeared from our own midst.
Nor need we be surprised at this, for the root whence all these
phenomena spring is the predominance of imagination over reason in the
uncivilized. Man, while his experience is limited to a small tract of
earth, and his life is divided between a struggle with nature and his
fellow-man for the permission and the means to live, on the one hand,
and seasons of idleness, empty perforce of every opportunity and every
desire for improving his condition, on the other, cannot acquire the
materials of a real knowledge of his physical environment. His only data
for interpreting the world and the objects it contains, so far as he is
acquainted with them, are his own consciousness and his own emotions.
Upon these his drafts are unbounded; and if he have any curiosity about
the origin and government of things, his hypotheses take the shape of
tales in which the actors, whatever form they bear, are essentially
himself in motive and deed, but magnified and distorted to meet his
wishes or his fears, or the conditions of the problem as presented to
his limited vision. The thought which is the measure of his universe is
as yet hardly disciplined by anything beyond his passions.
Nor does the predominance of the imagination issue only in these tales
and in songs--the two modes of expression we most readily attribute to
the imagination. In practical life it issues in superstitious
observances, and in social and political institutions. Social
institutions are sometimes of great complexity, even in the depth of
savagery. Together with political institutions they supply the model on
which are framed man's ideas of the relationship to one another and to
himself of the supernatural beings whom he creates; and in turn they
reflect and perpetuate those ideas in ceremonial and other observances.
The student of Fairy Tales, therefore, cannot afford to neglect the
study of institutions; for it often throws a light altogether
unexpected on the origin and meaning of a story. Tradition must, indeed,
be studied as a whole. As with other sciences, its division into parts
is natural and necessary; but it should never be forgotten that none of
its parts can be rightly understood without reference to the others. By
Tradition I mean the entire circle of thought and practice, custom as
well as belief, ceremonies, tales, music, songs, dances and other
amusements, the philosophy and the superstitions and the institutions,
delivered by word of mouth and by example from generation to generation
through unremembered ages: in a word, the sum total of the psychological
phenomena of uncivilized man. Every people has its own body of
Tradition, its own Folklore, which comprises a slowly diminishing part,
or the whole, of its mental furniture, according as the art of writing
is, or is not, known. The invention of writing, by enabling records to
be made and thoughts and facts to be communicated with certainty from
one to another, first renders possible the accumulation of true
knowledge and ensures a constantly accelerating advance in civilization.
But in every civilized nation there are backward classes to whom reading
and writing are either quite unknown, or at least unfamiliar; and there
are certain matters in the lives even of the lettered classes which
remain more or less under the dominion of Tradition. Culture, in the
sense of a mode of life guided by reason and utilizing the discoveries
and inventions that are the gift of science, finds its way but slowly
among a people, and filters only sluggishly through its habits, its
institutions and its creeds. Surely, however, though gradually it
advances, like a rising tide which creeps along the beach, here
undermining a heap of sand, there surrounding, isolating, and at last
submerging a rock, here swallowing up a pool brilliant with living
creatures and many-coloured weed, there mingling with and overwhelming a
rivulet that leaps down to its embrace, until all the shore is covered
with its waters. Meanwhile, he who would understand its course must know
the conformation of the coast,--the windings, the crags (their
composition as well as their shape), the hollows, the sands, the
streams; for without these its currents and its force are alike
inexplicable. The analogy must not be pressed too far; but it will help
us to understand why we find a fragment of a custom in one place, a
portion of a tale jumbled up with portions of dissimilar tales in
another place, a segment of a superstition, and again a worn and broken
relic of a once vigorous institution. They are the rocks and the sands
which the flood of civilization is first isolating, then undermining,
and at last overwhelming, and hiding from our view. They are (to change
the figure) survivals of an earlier state of existence, unintelligible
if regarded singly, made to render up their secret only by comparison
with other survivals, and with examples of a like state of existence
elsewhere. Taken collectively, they enable us to trace the evolution of
civilization from a period before history begins, and through more
recent times by channels whereof history gives no account.
These are the premises whence we set out, and the principles which will
guide us, in the study on which we are about to enter. The name of Fairy
Tales is legion; but they are made up of incidents whose number is
comparatively limited. And though it would be impossible to deal
adequately with more than a small fraction of them in a work like the
present, still a selection may be so treated as to convey a reasonably
just notion of the application of the principles laid down and of the
results to be obtained. In making such a selection several interesting
groups of stories, unconnected as between themselves, might be chosen
for consideration. The disadvantage of this course would be the
fragmentary nature of the discussions, and consequently of the
conclusions arrived at. It is not wholly possible to avoid this
disadvantage in any mode of treatment; but it is possible to lessen it.
I propose, therefore, to deal with a few of the most interesting sagas
relative to the Fairy Mythology strictly so called. We shall thus
confine our view to a well-defined area, in the hope that we may obtain
such an idea of it as in its main lines at all events may be taken to be
fairly true to the facts, and that we may learn who really were these
mysterious beings who played so large a part in our fathers'
superstitions. As yet, however, we must not be disappointed if we find
that the state of scientific inquiry will not admit of many conclusions,
and such as we may reach can at present be stated only tentatively and
with caution. Science, like Mr. Fox in the nursery tale, writes up over
all the doors of her palace:
"Be bold, be bold, but not too bold."
Many a victim has found to his cost what it meant to disregard this
warning.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] I have not thought it necessary to illustrate at length the
characteristics of savage thought enumerated above. They are
exhaustively discussed by Dr. Tylor in "Primitive Culture," Sir John
Lubbock in "The Origin of Civilization," Mr. Andrew Lang in "Myth Ritual
and Religion," and some of them by Mr. J. G. Frazer in "Totemism," and
more recently in "The Golden Bough," published since these pages were
written.