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think it impossible at present to determine how far they may have been transmitted from people to people, and wafted from place to place, in the obscure and immeasurable past of human antiquity, or how far they may be due to identity of human fancy everywhere. (3) As to the relations between Household Tales and Greek or other civilised myths, we prefer the following theory, which leaves room for many exceptions. The essence both of märchen and myths is a number of impossible and very peculiar incidents. These incidents are due to the natural qualities of the savage imagination. Again, the incidents are combined into various romantic arrangements, each of these arrangements being a märchen. The märchen were originally told, among untutored peoples, about anonymous heroes,—a boy, a girl, a lion, a bear,—such were the leading characters of the earliest tales. As tribes became settled, these old stories were localised, the adventures (originally anonymous) were attributed to real or imaginary named persons or gods, and were finally adorned by the fancy of poets like the early singers of Greece. Thus, while a savage race has its märchen (in which the characters are usually beasts or anonymous persons), the civilised race (or the race in a state of higher barbarism) has the same tale, developed and elaborated into a localised myth, with heroes rejoicing in such noble names as Perseus, Odysseus, Jason, Leminkainen, or Maui. But while the progressive classes in civilised countries are acquainted with the named heroes, and the elaborate forms of the legends, the comparatively stationary and uneducated classes of shepherds, husbandmen, wood-men, and fishers, retain a version but little advanced from the old savage story. They have not purified away the old ferocious and irrational elements of the tale, or at most they have substituted for the nameless heroes, characters derived from history or from