into| | |
1. Savage | roebuck | -- | -- | --
elements | after | | |
| drinking at | | |
| stream | | |
---------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------

There are thus savage elements in seven out of twelve stories, and
the question becomes an important one as to how this is. They are the
stories of the nursery, told by mothers to children, stories kept
alive by tradition, and the only possible answer to our question is
that they contain fragments of the early culture-history of the
ancestors, or at all events the predecessors, of those who have
preserved them for our use. An occasional savage incident might have
been considered a freak of the original narrator, or a borrowing by
one of the countless late narrators of these stories brought home from
savage countries; but statistics disprove both of these suppositions.
It is not accidental but persistent savagery we meet with in the
folk-tale. It is also the savagery to be found amongst modern peoples
still in the savage stage of culture.

This is proved in a very complete manner by Mr. MacCulloch, whose
study provides the material for a statistical survey of story
incidents founded on primitive custom and belief.[110] They are the
most ancient history to which we have access. That this history is
contained in the folk-tales of modern peasantry shows it to have come
from that far-off period which saw the earliest condition of these
people. It is still history, if it tells us of a life which preceded
the written record. It is history of the most valuable description,
for it is to be found nowhere else as relating to the remotest period
of European civilisation. The modern savage is better off in this
respect. He has an outside historian in the traveller and the
anthropologist of modern days. The savage who was ancestor to our own
people had no such means of becoming known to history, or had but very
limited means, and it is only in the deathless tradition that we can
trace him out.

These conclusions have been drawn from that great class of tradition
preserved by historic peoples in historic times, and yet unmistakably
pointing to prehistoric culture. We have been able to show the methods
to be adopted for, and the results of, disengaging the myth which ha