| Story radicals | Story accidentals | Added features | Modern gloss | |
| 1. Savage elements | Talking animals Cutting open of the animal to free the swallowed kids, and refilling the stomach with stones | Criticism upon men as compared with animals, 'truly men are like that' | — | — |
VI.—Faithful John
| Story radicals | Story accidentals | Added features | Modern gloss | |
| 1. Savage elements | Capture of bride Talking of animals Three taboos— Horse Garment Sucking of breasts Sacrifice of children and sprinkling of their blood on a stone Human origin of stone pillar | — | — | — |
| 3. Rank and splendour | — | — | — | Kingly state and great wealth in gold and riches |
| 4. Moral characteristics | — | Punishment for curiosity | — | — |
IX.—The Twelve Brothers
| Story radicals | Story accidentals | Added features | Modern gloss | |
| 1. Savage elements | Going [causing to go] away of sons, so that the
inheritance should fall to the daughter Change of brothers into ravens Life dependent on an outside object | Forest life | — | — |
| 3. Rank and splendour | — | — | — | Kingly state |
| 4. Moral characteristics | — | — | — | — |
XI.—Brother and Sister
| Story radicals | Story accidentals | Added features | Modern gloss | |
| 1. Savage elements | Transformation of hero into roebuck after drinking at stream | — | — | — |
There are thus savage elements in seven out of twelve stories, and the question becomes an important one as to how this is. They are the stories of the nursery, told by mothers to children, stories kept alive by tradition, and the only possible answer to our question is that they contain fragments of the early culture-history of the ancestors, or at all events the predecessors, of those who have preserved them for our use. An occasional savage incident might have been considered a freak of the original narrator, or a borrowing by one of the countless late narrators of these stories brought home from savage countries; but statistics disprove both of these suppositions. It is not accidental but persistent savagery we meet with in the folk-tale. It is also the savagery to be found amongst modern peoples still in the savage stage of culture.
This is proved in a very complete manner by Mr. MacCulloch, whose study provides the material for a statistical survey of story incidents founded on primitive custom and belief.[110] They are the most ancient history to which we have access. That this history is contained in the folk-tales of modern peasantry shows it to have come from that far-off period which saw the earliest condition of these people. It is still history, if it tells us of a life which preceded the written record. It is history of the most valuable description, for it is to be found nowhere else as relating to the remotest period of European civilisation. The modern savage is better off in this respect. He has an outside historian in the traveller and the anthropologist of modern days. The savage who was ancestor to our own people had no such means of becoming known to history, or had but very limited means, and it is only in the deathless tradition that we can trace him out.