The agreement between two such stories, for
instance, as those of Faithful John and Rama and Luxman is so
close as to make it incredible that they should have been
independently fabricated, while the points of difference are
so important as to make it extremely improbable that the one
was ever copied from the other. Besides which, the essential
identity of such myths as those of Sigurd and Theseus, or of
Helena and Sarama, carries us back historically to a time when
the scattered Indo-European tribes had not yet begun to hold
commercial and intellectual intercourse with each other, and
consequently could not have interchanged their epic materials
or their household stories. We are therefore driven to the
conclusion--which, startling as it may seem, is after all the
most natural and plausible one that can be stated--that the
Aryan nations, which have inherited from a common ancestral
stock their languages and their customs, have inherited also
from the same common original their fireside legends. They
have preserved Cinderella and Punchkin just as they have
preserved the words for father and mother, ten and twenty; and
the former case, though more imposing to the imagination, is
scientifically no less intelligible than the latter.
Thirdly, it has been shown that these venerable tales may be
grouped in a few pretty well defined classes; and that the
archetypal myth of each class--the primitive story in
conformity to which countless subsequent tales have been
generated--was originally a mere description of physical
phenomena, couched in the poetic diction of an age when
everything was personified, because all natural phenomena were
supposed to be due to the direct workings of a volition like
that of which men were conscious within themselves.
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