ic the Red. The story of the Trojan
War and its heroes, as we have it in Homer and the Athenian dramatists,
is pure folk-lore as regards form, and chiefly folk-lore as regards
contents. It is in a high degree probable that this mass of folk-lore
surrounds a kernel of plain fact, that in times long before the first
Olympiad an actual "king of men" at Mycenae conducted an expedition
against the great city by the Simois, that the Agamemnon of the poet
stands in some such relation toward this chieftain as that in which the
Charlemagne of mediaeval romance stands toward the mighty Emperor of the
West.[236] Nevertheless the story, as we have it, is simply folk-lore.
If the Iliad and Odyssey contain faint reminiscences of actual events,
these events are so inextricably wrapped up with mythical phraseology
that by no cunning of the scholar can they be construed into history.
The motives and capabilities of the actors and the conditions under
which they accomplish their destinies are such as exist only in
fairy-tales. Their world is as remote from that in which we live as the
world of Sindbad and Camaralzaman; and this is not essentially altered
by the fact that Homer introduces us to definite localities and familiar
customs as often as the Irish legends of Finn M'Cumhail.[237]

[Footnote 235: _Proceedings Mass. Hist. Soc._, December, 1887.]

[Footnote 236: I used this argument twenty years ago in
qualification of the over-zealous solarizing views of Sir G. W.
Cox and others. See my _Myths and Mythmakers_, pp. 191-202; and
cf. Freeman on "The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early
English History," in his _Historical Essays_, i. 1-39.]

[Footnote 237: Curtin, _Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland_, pp.
12, 204, 303; Kennedy, _Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts_,
pp. 203-311.]

[Sidenote: The Saga of Eric the Red is not folk-lore.]

It would be hard to find anything more unlike such writings than the
class of Icelandic sagas to which that of Eric the Red belongs. Here we
have quiet and sober narrative, not in the least like a fairy-tale, but
often much like a ship's log. Whatever such narrative may be, it is not
folk-lore. In act and motive, in its conditions and laws, its world is
the every-day world in which we live. If now and then a "uniped" happens
to stray into it, the incongruity is as conspicuous as in the case of
Hudson's mermaid, or a gho