s purpose of commemorating the invented
incident. There is then no tradition in any one of the stages through
which the episode has passed. It is all history and false history.
Historians cannot shake off their responsibilities by looking upon the
local antiquary as the responsible author of tradition. They cannot
but admit that the local antiquary belongs to the historical school,
even though he is not a fully equipped member of his craft, and
because he blunders they must not class him as a folklorist. They must
bring better evidence than this to show the worthlessness of
tradition. In the meantime it is the constant definition of tradition
as worthless, the relegation of worthless history "to the realms of
folklore,"[6] which does so much harm to the study of folklore as a
science.[7] Because the historian misnames an historical error as
tradition, or fails to discover, at the moment he requires it, the
fact which lies hidden in tradition, he must not dismiss the whole
realm of tradition as useless for historical purposes.

Let us freely admit that the historian is not altogether to blame for
his neglect and for his ignorance of tradition as historical material.
He has nothing very definite to work upon. Even the great work of
Grimm is open to the criticism that it does not _prove_ the antiquity
of popular custom and belief--it merely states the proposition, and
then relies for proof upon the accumulation of an enormous number of
examples and the almost entire impossibility of suggesting any other
origin than that of antiquity for such a mass of non-Christian
material. Then the great work of Grimm, ethnographical in its methods,
has never been followed up by similar work for other countries. The
philosophy of folklore has taken up almost all the time of our
scholars and students, and the contribution it makes to the history of
the civilised races has not been made out by folklorists themselves.
It does not appear to me to be difficult to make out such a claim if
only scientific methods are adopted, and the solution of definite
problems is attempted;[8] and if too the difficulties in the way of
proof are freely admitted, and where they become insuperable, the
attempt at proof is frankly abandoned. I believe that every single
item of folklore, every folk-tale, every tradition, every custom and
superstition, has its origin in some definite fact in the history of
man; but I am ready to concede that the definite fact is n