1. So far as the ideas in The Two Brothers are representative of märchen (and these ideas are inextricably interwoven with some of the most typical legends), historic India is certainly and demonstrably not the cradle of popular tales. These are found far earlier already in the written literature of Egypt.
2. As far as these ideas are representative of märchen, there is absolutely no evidence to show that märchen sprang from India, whether historical or prehistoric; nor is any connection proved between ancient Egypt and prehistoric India.
3. As far as märchen are represented by the ideas in The Two Brothers and the Predestined Prince, there is absolutely no evidence to show in what region or where they were originally invented.
The Bellerophon story rests on a donnee in The Two Brothers; the Flight rests on another; Cinderella reposes on a third; the giant with no heart in his body depends on a fourth; the Milk-White Dove on the same; and these incidents occur in Hottentot, Bechuana, Samoyed, Samoan, as well as in Greek, Scotch, German, Gaelia Now, as all these incidents existed in Egyptian marchen fourteen hundred years before Christ, they may have been dispersed without Indian intervention. One of the white raiders from the Northern Sea may have been made captive, like the pseud-Odysseus, in Egypt; may have heard the tales; may have been ransomed, and carried the story to Greece or Libya, whence a Greek got it. Southwards it may have passed up the Nile to the Great Lakes, and down the Congo and Zambesi, and southward ever with the hordes of T'Chaka's ancestors. All these processes are possible and even probable, but absolutely nothing is known for certain on the subject. It is only as manifest as facts can be that all this might have occurred if the Indian peninsula did not exist. Another objection to the hypothesis of distribution from historic India is the existence of sagas or epic legends corresponding to marchen in pre-Homeric Greece. The story of Jason, for example, is in its essential features, perhaps, the most widely diffused of all.* The story of the return of the husband, and of his difficult recognition by his wife, the central idea of the Odyssey, is of wide distribution, and the Odyssey (as Fenelon makes the ghost of Achilles tell Homer in Hades) is un amas de contes de vieilles. The Cyclops, the Siren, Scylla, and the rest,** these tales did not reach Greece from historic India at least, and we have no reason for supposing that India before the dawn of history was their source.
* Custom and Myth, "A Far-Travelled Tale ".
** Gerland, Alt Griechische Marchen in der Odyssee.
The reasons for which India has been regarded as a great centre and fountain-head of popular stories are, on the other hand, excellent, if the theory is sufficiently limited. The cause is vera causa. Marchen certainly did set out from mediaeval India, and reached mediaeval Europe and Asia in abundance. Not to speak of oral communications in the great movements, missions and migrations, Tartar, crusading, Gypsy, commercial and Buddhistic—in all of which there must have been "swopping of stories"—it is certain that Western literature was actually invaded by the contes which had won away into the literature of India.* These are facts beyond doubt, but these facts must not be made the basis of too wide an inference. Though so many stories have demonstrably been borrowed from India in the historical period, it is no less certain that many existed in Europe before their introduction. Again, as has been ably argued by a writer in the Athenaeum (April 23, 1887), the literary versions of the tales probably had but a limited influence on the popular narrators, the village gossips and grandmothers. Thus no collection of published tales has ever been more popular than that of Charles Perrault, which for many years has been published not only in cheap books, but in cheaper broadsheets.
* Cosquin, op. cit., i. xv., xxiv.; Max Müller, "The
Migrations of Fables," Selected Essays, vol. ii., Appendix;
Benfey, Pantschatantra; Comparetti, Introduction to Book of
Sindibad, English translation of the Folk-Lore Society.
Yet M. Sebillot and other French collectors gather from the lips of peasants versions of Cinderella, for example, quite unaffected by Perrault's version, and rich in archaic features, such as the presence of a miracle-working beast instead of a fairy godmother. That detail is found in Kaffir, and Santhal, and Finnish, as well as in Celtic, and Portuguese, and Scottish variants, and has been preserved in popular French traditions, despite the influence of Perrault. In the same way, M. Carnoy finds only the faintest traces of the influence of a collection so popular as the Arabian Nights. The peasantry regard tales which they read in books as quite apart from their inherited store of legend.*
* Sebillot's popular Cendrillon is Le Taureau Bleu in Contes
de la Haute Bretagne. See also M. Carnoy's Contes
Francais, 1885, p. 9.
If printed literature has still so little power over popular tradition, the manuscript literature of the Middle Ages must have had much less, though sometimes contes from India were used as parables by preachers. Thus we must beware of over-estimating the effect of importation from India, even where it distinctly existed. Even the versions that were brought in the Middle Ages by oral tradition must have encountered versions long settled in Europe—versions which may have been current before any scribe of Egypt perpetuated a legend on papyrus.