which Mr. Thoms has Englished thus:
"Who to his children gives his bread
And thereby himself suffers need,
With this mallet strike him dead."[1]
These rhymes are the same as those in the Scottish tale and its Latin analogue, and that they are preserved on the selfsame instrument which is mentioned in the story as bearing the inscription is proof enough, I think, that the mallets and their rhyming formulæ are far older than the story. They are not mythical, the story is; their history is contained in the facts we have above detailed; the history of the folk-tale commences when the history of the mallet fades from the facts of life.
To these rhyming formulæ, then, I would trace the rise of the mythic tale told by the Highland peasant in 1862 to Mr. J. F. Campbell. The old customs which we have detailed as the true origin of the mallet and its hideous use in killing the aged and infirm had died out, but the symbol of them remained. To explain the symbol a myth was created, which kept sufficiently near to the original idea as to retain evidence of its close connection with the descent of property; and thus was launched the dateless, impersonal, unlocalised story which Mr. Campbell has given as a specimen of vagrant traditions which "must have been invented after agriculture and fixed habitations, after laws of property and inheritance; but it may be as old as the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, or Egyptian civilisation, or Adam, whose sons tilled the earth."[2] I would venture to rewrite the last clause of this dictum of the great master of folk-tales, and I would suggest that the story, whatever its age as a story, tells us of facts in the life of its earliest narrators which do not belong to Teutonic or Celtic history. The Aryan, with his traditional reverence for parental authority, at once patriarchal and priestly, would have stamped upon his memory, with
- ↑ Gentleman's Magazine, 1850, i, 252.
- ↑ Journ. Ethnol. Soc., ii, 337.
