ame plot and incidents occur among Egyptians and the
Central Australian tribes, or among the frosty Samoyeds and Eskimo,
the Samoans, the Andamanese, the Zulus, and the Japanese, as well as
among Celts and ancient Greeks--can we be absolutely certain that the
story has not been diffused and borrowed, in the backward of time.
Thus the date and place of origin of these eternal stories, the
groundwork of ballads and popular tales, can never be ascertained. The
oldest known version may be found in the literature of Egypt or
Chaldaea, but it is an obvious fallacy to argue that the place of
origin must be the place where the tale was first written down in
hieroglyph or cuneiform characters.

There the stories are: they are as common among the remotest savages
as among the peasants of Hungary, France, or Assynt. They bear all the
birth-marks of an early society, with the usual customs and
superstitions of man in such a stage of existence. Their oldest and
least corrupted forms exist among savages, and people who do not read
and write. But when reading and writing and a class of professional
minstrels and tellers of tales arose, these men invented no new plots,
but borrowed the plots and incidents of the world-old popular stories.
They adapted these to their own condition of society, just as the
plantation negroes adapted Orpheus and Eurydice. They elevated the
nameless heroes and heroines into Kings, Queens, and Knights,
Odysseus, Arthur, Charlemagne, Diarmid, and the rest. They took an
ancient popular tale, known all over the earth, and attributed the
adventures of the characters to historical persons, like Charlemagne
and his family, or to Saints, for the legends of early Celtic Saints
are full of fairy-tale materials. Characters half historic, half
fabulous, like Arthur, were endowed with fairy gifts, and inherited
the feats of nameless imaginary heroes.

The results of this uncritical literary handling of elements really
popular were the national romances of Arthur, of Charlemagne, of
Sigurd, or of Etzel. The pagan legends were Christianised, like that
of Beowulf; they were expanded into measureless length, whole cycles
were invented about the heroic families; poets altered the materials
each in his own way and to serve his own purpose, and often to glorify
his own country. If the Saracens told their story of Roland at
Roncevalles, it would be very different from that of the old Frankish
_chansons de geste_. Thus the rom