it may be as old as the
lake-dwellings of Switzerland, or Egyptian civilisation, or Adam,
whose sons tilled the earth."[106] I would venture to rewrite the last
clause of this dictum of the great master of folk-tales, and I would
suggest that the story, whatever its age as a story, tells us of facts
in the life of its earliest narrators which do not belong to Teutonic
or Celtic history. The Teuton and the Celt, with their traditional
reverence for parental authority, at once patriarchal and priestly,
would retain, with singular clearness, the memory of traditions, or it
may be observations, of an altogether different set of ideas which
belonged to the race with which they first came into contact. But
whether the story is a mythic interpretation by Celts of pre-Celtic
practices, or a pre-Celtic tradition, varied as soon as it became the
property of the Celt to suit Celtic ideas, it clearly takes us back to
practices very remote, to use Mr. Elton's forcible words, from the
reverence for the parents' authority which might have perhaps been
expected from descendants of "the Aryan household."[107] These
practices lead us back to a period of savagery, of which we have to
speak in terms of race distinction if we would get at its root.[108]
The importance of such a conclusion cannot be overrated, for it leads
directly to the issue which must be raised whenever an investigation
of tradition leaves us with materials, which are promptly rejected as
fragments of Celtic history because they are too savage, but which
need not therefore be rejected as history, because they may be
referred further back than Celtic history.

If we proceed by more drastic methods, by the methods of statistics,
we shall arrive at much the same conclusion.[109] Taking the first
twelve stories in Grimm's great collection, we find that seven of them
yield elements which we are entitled to call savage, because they are
so far removed from the European culture amidst which the folk-tales
have lived, and because these elements belong not to the accidentals
of the stories but to the essentials. Thus, if we divide the folk-tale
into its components, we shall find that it consists of three
features:--

1. The story radicals, or essential plot;

2. The story accidentals, or illustrative points;

3. Modern gloss upon the events in the story--

and if we go on to allocate the various incidents of the stories to
these three heads, we get the following common resu