Novelline_). Wilhelm Grimm, in the comparative notes which he added
to successive editions of the _Maehrchen_ 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
mythopoeic 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
"formulae," which outlined the plots of the stories found scattered
through the German, Greek, Italian, Servian, Roumanian, Lithuanian,
and Indian myth and folk-tale areas. These formulae 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 formulae. Those were the days when Max
Mueller'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 formulae 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 Mueller and considerably reduced the
importance of folk tales as throwing