seems to hark back to primitive times and totemistic beliefs. And more important still, it is a touch which vitalises the other variants in which the helpful animal is rather dragged in by the horns. Mr. Nutt's lucky find at the last moment seems to throw more light on the origin of the tale than almost the whole of the remaining collection.
But does this find necessarily prove an original Celtic origin for Cinderella? Scarcely. It remains to be proved that this introductory part of the story with helpful animal was necessarily part of the original. Having regard to the feudal character underlying the whole conception, it remains possible that the earlier part was ingeniously dovetailed on to the latter from some pre-existing and more archaic tale, perhaps that represented by the Grimms' "One Eyed, Two Eyes, and Three Eyes." The possibility of the introduction of an archaic formula which had become a convention of folk-telling cannot be left out of account.
The "Youngest-best" formula which occurs in Cinderella, and on which Mr. Lang laid much stress in his treatment of the subject in his Perrault as a survival of the old tenure of "junior right," does not throw much light on the subject. Mr. Ralston, in the Nineteenth Century, 1879, was equally unenlightening with his sun-myths.
Source.—I have taken a point here and a point there from the various English versions mentioned in the next section. I have expanded the names, so as to make a jingle from the Dildrom and Doldrum of Harland.
Parallels.—Five variants of this quaint legend have been collected in England: (1) Halliwell, Pop. Rhymes, 167, "Molly Dixon"; (2) Choice Notes—Folk-Lore, p. 73, "Colman Grey"; (3) Folk-Lore Journal, ii. 22, "King o' the Cats"; (4) Folk-Lore—England (Gibbings), "Johnny Reed's Cat"; (5) Harland and Wilkinson, Lancashire Legends, p. 13, "Dildrum Doldrum." Sir F. Palgrave gives a Danish parallel; cp. Halliwell, l.c.
Remarks.—An interesting example of the spread and development of a simple anecdote throughout England. Here again we can scarcely imagine more than a single origin for the tale which is, in its way, as weird and fantastic as E. A. Poe.
