right places. The folklorist has the most to do to
get his results ready, and to explain and secure his position. He has
been wandering about in a somewhat inconsequential fashion, bent upon
finding a _mythos_ where he should have sought for a _persona_ or a
_locus_, engaged in an extensive quest after parallels when he should
have been preparing his own material for the process of comparative
science, seeking for origins amidst human error when he should have
turned to human experience. He has to change all this waywardness for
systematic study, and this will lead him in the first place to
disengage from the results hitherto obtained those which may be
accepted and which may form the starting-point for future work. But
his greatest task will be the reconsideration of former results and
the rewriting of much that has been written on the wrong lines, and
when this is done we shall have the historian and folklorist meeting
together in the spirit which Edmund Spenser so finely and truly
described three centuries ago in his treatment of Irish history: "I do
herein rely upon those bards or Irish chronicles ... but unto them
besides I add mine own reading and out of them both together with
comparison of times likewise of manners and customs, affinity of words
and manner, properties of natures and uses, resemblances of rites and
ceremonies, monuments of churches and tombs and many other like
circumstances I do gather a likelihood of truth, not certainly
affirming anything, but by conferring of times language monuments and
such like I do hunt out a probability of things which I leave to your
judgment to believe or refuse."[10]

I shall of course not be able to undertake either of these tasks. I
shall attempt, however, to indicate their scope and importance; and as
a preliminary to the consideration of the definite departments into
which the subject falls, it is advisable, I think, to test the
relationship of tradition to history by means of one or two
illustrations. It may be that the illustrations I shall give are not
accepted by all students, that some better illustration is forthcoming
by further research. This is one of the drawbacks from which tradition
suffers, and must suffer, until our studies are much further advanced
than they are at present. But I am glad to accept this possibility of
error as part of the case for the study of tradition, because the
error of one student cannot be held to disqualify the whole subject