This feature the nursery tale shares with the god-saga; Zeus confounds the Titans, Apollo slays the Python, Lug overcomes Balor, Indra vanquishes Vritra. There are two apparent exceptions to this rule. The Teutonic god myth is tragic; the Anses are ever under the shadow of the final conflict. This has been explained by the influence of Christian ideas; but although this influence must be unreservedly admitted in certain details of the passing of the gods, yet the fact that the Iranian god-saga is likewise undecided, instead of having a frankly optimistic ending, makes me doubt whether the drawn battle between the powers of good and ill be not a genuine and necessary part of the Teutonic mythology. As is well known, Rydberg has established some striking points of contact between the mythic ideas of Scandinavia and those of Iran.
In striking contradiction to this moral, optimistic tendency are the great heroic sagas. One and all well-nigh are profoundly tragic. The doom of Troy the great, the passing of Arthur, the slaughter of the Nibelungs, the death of Sohrab at his father’s hands, Roncevalles, Gabhra, the fratricidal conflict of Cuchullain and Ferdiad, the woes of the house of Atreus; such are but a few examples of the prevailing tone of the hero-tales. Achilles and Siegfried and Cuchullain are slain in the flower of their youth and prowess. Of them, at least, the saying is true, that whom the gods love die young. Why is it not equally true of the prince hero of the fairy tale? Is it that the hero-tale associated in the minds of hearers and reciters with men who had actually lived and fought, brought down to earth, so to say, out of the mysterious wonderland in which god and fairy and old time kings have their being, becomes thereby liable to the necessities of death and decay inherent in all human things? Some scholars have a ready answer for this and similar questions. The heroic epos assumed its shape once for all among one special race, and was then passed on to the other races who remained faithful to the main lines whilst altering details. If this explanation were true, it would still leave unsolved the problem, why the heroic epos, which for its fashioners and hearers was at once a record of the actual and an exemplar of the ideal, should, among men differing in blood and culture, follow one model, and that a tragic one. Granting that Greek and Teuton and Celt did borrow the tales which they themselves conceived to be very blood and bone of their race, what force compelled them all to borrow one special conception of life and fate?
Such exceptions as there are to the tragic nature of the heroic saga are apparent rather than real. The Odyssey ends happily, like an old-fashioned novel, but Fénélon long ago recognised in the Odyssey—“un amas de contes de vieille.”
Perseus again has the luck of a fairy-tale prince, but then the story of his fortunes is obviously a fairy-tale, with named instead of anonymous personages.
Whilst the fairy-tale is akin in tone to the god saga, the ballad recalls the heroic epos. The vast majority of ballads are tragic. Sir Patrick Spens must drown, and Glasgerion’s leman be cheated by the churl; Clerk Saunders comes from the other world, like Helge to Sigrun; Douglas dreams his dreary dream, “I saw a dead man win a fight, and that dead man was I.” The themes of the ballad are the most dire and deadly of human passions; love scorned or betrayed, hate, and revenge. Very seldom, too, do the plots of ballad and märchen cross or overlap. Where this does happen it will, as a rule, be found that both are common descendants of some great saga.
We find such an instance in the Fenian saga, episodes of which have lived on in the Gaelic folk memory in the double form of prose and poetry. But it should be noted that the poetry accentuates the tragic side—the battle of Gabhra, the death of Diarmaid—whilst the prose takes rather some episode of Finn’s youth or manhood, and presents it as a rounded and complete whole, the issue of which is fortunate.
The relations of myth and epos to folk-lore may thus be likened to that of trees to the soil from which they spring, and which they enrich and fertilize by the decay of their leaves and branches which mingle indistinguishably with the original soil. Of this soil, again, rude bricks may be made, and a house built; let the house fall into ruins, and the bricks crumble into dust, it will be hard to discriminate that dust from the parent earth. But raise a house of iron or stone, and, however ruined, its fragments can always be recognised. In the case of the Irish bardic literature the analogy is, I believe, with soil and tree, rather than with soil and edifice.
Reverting once more to the characteristics of folk-fancy, let us note that they appear equally in folk-practice and folk-belief. The tough conservatism of the folk-mind has struck all observers: its adherence to immemorial formulas; its fatalistic acceptance of the mysteries of nature and heredity, coupled with its faith in the efficacy of sympathetic magic; its elaborate system of custom and ritual based upon the idea that between men and the remainder of the universe there is no difference of kind.
A conception of the Cosmos is thus arrived at which, more than any religious creed, fulfils the test of catholicity; literally, and in the fullest significance of the words, it has been held semper, ubique et ab omnibus. And of this conception of the universe, more universal than any that has as yet swayed the minds of man, it is possible that men now living may see the last flickering remains; it is well-nigh certain that our grandchildren will live in a world out of which it has utterly vanished.
For the folk-lorist the Gospel saying is thus more pregnant with meaning than for any other student of man’s history—“the night cometh wherein no man may work.” Surely, many Irishmen will take to heart the example of Dr. Hyde, and will go forth to glean what may yet be found of as fair and bounteous a harvest of myth and romance as ever flourished among any race.