Fairy Tales, Their Origin and Meaning; With Some Account of Dwellers in FairylandBunce, John Thackray
History
Fairy Tales, Their Origin and Meaning; With Some Account of Dwellers in Fairyland
Bunce, John Thackray
Fairy tales -- History and criticism
relation between the sun and the earth, the succession of night and
day, of winter and summer, of storm and calm, of cloud and tempest, and
golden sunshine and bright blue sky. And this is the source from which
we get our Fairy Stories; for underneath all of them there are the same
fanciful meanings, only changed and altered in the way of putting
them, by the lapse of ages of time, by the circumstances of different
countries, and by the fancy of those who kept the wonderful tales alive
without knowing what they meant.
When the change happened that brought about all this, we do not know. It
was thousands of years ago that the Aryan people began their march out
of their old country in mid-Asia. But from the remains of their language
and the likeness of their legends to those amongst other nations, we do
know that ages and ages ago their country grew too small for them, so
they were obliged to move away from it. They could not go eastward, for
the great mountains shut them in; they could not go northward, for the
great desert was too barren for their flocks and herds. So they turned,
some of them southward into India and Persia, and some of them westward
into Europe--at the time, perhaps, when the land of Europe stretched
from the borders of Asia to our own islands, and when there was no sea
between us and what is now the mainland. How they made their long and
toilsome march we know not. But, as Kingsley writes of such a movement
of an ancient tribe, so we may fancy these old Aryans marching
westward--"the tall, bare-limbed men, with stone axes on their shoulders
and horn bows at their backs, with herds of grey cattle, guarded by huge
lop-eared mastiffs, with shaggy white horses, heavy-horned sheep and
silky goats, moving always westward through the boundless steppes,
whither or why we know not, but that the All-Father had sent them forth.
And behind us [he makes them say] the rosy snow-peaks died into ghastly
grey, lower and lower, as every evening came; and before us the plains
spread infinite, with gleaming salt-lakes, and ever-fresh tribes of
gaudy flowers. Behind us, dark: lines of living beings streamed down
the mountain slopes; around us, dark lines crawled along the
plains--westward, westward ever. Who could stand against us? We met the
wild asses on the steppe, and tamed them, and made them our slaves. We
slew the bison herds, and swam broad rivers on their skins. The Python
snake lay across our path; the wolves and wild dogs snarled at us out
of their coverts; we slew them and went on. The forests rose in black
tangled barriers, we hewed our way through them and went on. Strange
giant tribes met us, and eagle-visaged hordes, fierce and foolish; we
smote them, hip and thigh, and went on, west-ward ever." And so, as they
went on, straight towards the west, or as they turned north and south,
and thus overspread new lands, they brought with them their old ways of
thought and forms of belief, and the stories in which these had
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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