Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/39

Dawn, who rises before the Sun, her master, and 'hangs out the clothes' (the clouds) across the sky; the particular blackbird who so tragically ends the tale by 'snipping off her nose,' is the hour of sunrise. The time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing to prove it a sun-myth, that one thing being a proof by some argument more valid than analogy." Mr. Tylor easily shows that historical persons may be disposed of no less readily than the characters of Nursery Rhymes as solar-myths. Analogy is usually the one argument advanced for this scheme, and the analogies (as will be shown) are often so faint as to be practically non-existent. What "false analogies" can be made to prove, Mr. Max Müller has demonstrated (Selected Essays, ii. p. 449). Mr. Müller has also gently censured (Selected Essays, i. 564, 565) the ready way in which M. Husson shows that Red Hiding Hood was the Dawn: "It would be a bold assertion to say that the story of Red Riding Hood was really a metamorphosis of an ancient story of the rosy-fingered Eos, or the Vedic Ushas with her red horses." In Mr. Müller's opinion "there is but one safe path to follow in these researches into the origin of words or stories.... In addition to the coincidences in characteristic events, we have the evidence of language. Names are stubborn things," and more to the same purpose. Here we touch one of the differences between Sir George Cox and Mr. Max Müller. Mr. Müller, like Sir George Cox, is of opinion that all the stories of princesses imprisoned, and delivered by young bright heroes, "can be traced back to mythological tradition about the spring being released from the bonds of winter." But in each case Mr. Müller asks for names of characters in the story, names capable of being analysed into some equivalent for powers of nature, sun, wind, night, or what not. Now, we have elsewhere tried to show that, in mythological interpreta-