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most portentous of realities; and in this lies the secret of the almost
universal diffusion of certain typical tales, beliefs, and observances,
and of the fascination which they have not ceased to exercise over the
imagination of mankind.

Into the subject of the origins, the relationships, and the
signification of these venerable traditions and superstitions of the
race and of all races, there is neither time nor occasion for entering.
This oldest and yet last found of the realms of science is as yet only
in course of being surveyed, and from day to day fresh discoveries are
announced by the eager explorers of the darkling provinces of myth and
folktale. But this at least may be said, that not in the wide domain of
popular saga and poetry can there be reaped a richer or more varied
harvest of weird and wild and beautiful fancies, touched by the light
that 'never was on sea or land,' than is to be found in the Scottish
ballads.

From among them one could gather out a whole menagerie of the 'selcouth'
beasts and birds and creeping things that have been banished from solid
earth into the limbo of Faery and Romance. They furnish examples of
nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have
discovered in the vast jungle of popular legends and superstitions--the
Supernatural Birth, the Life and Faith Tokens, the Dragon Slayer, the
Mermaid and the Despised Sister, Bluebeard of the Many Wives, the Well
of Healing, the Magic Mirror, the Enchanted Horn, the Singing Bone, the
Babes in the Wood, the Blabbing Popinjay, the Counterpart, the
Transformation, the Spell, the Prophecy, the Riddle, the Return from the
Grave, the Dead Ride, the Demon Lover, the Captivity in Faeryland, the
Seven Years' Kain to Hell, and a host of others.

Certain of them, like _Thomas the Rhymer_ and _Young Tamlane_, are
'fulfilled all of Faery.' One can read in them how deeply the old
superstition, which some would attribute to a traditional memory of the
pre-Aryan inhabitants of Western Europe--to the 'barrow-wights,'
pigmies, or Pechts who dwelt in or were driven for shelter to caves and
other underground dwellings of the land--had struck its roots in the
popular fancy. Probably Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go
at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that
the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies,
is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of
ear