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at their first emigration from their Asian homes. Others may have been imported by wandering minstrels at later periods. The process of communication must have gone on from a very remote antiquity. Quite recently Egyptian romances have been discovered in manuscripts of the 1th or 14th centuries before Christ, which have all the childish naïveté and the stock incidents of the modern fairy tale. The intercourse which early existed between Egypt, the Western part of the Asian Continent and Europe explains sufficiently the diffusion of this ancient literature over that portion of the earth’s surface which we are accustomed to call the West. But we should be less prepared à priori to find European legends making their appearance in a country like Japan so isolated and remote, and which, so far as it has borrowed, has done so chiefly from China, itself a country of which the literature is indigenous, and whose legends have not much affinity with those of Western Asia.
Some instances, however, of Japanese legends bearing affinity to those of the far West do occur, and one at least so remarkable that it has appeared to me worth making the subject of enquiry. The object of the present paper is simply to open the matter and to invite to it the attention of Japanese scholars, who are more qualified than myself, to institute a comparison between the whole cycle of Japanese legends and those current in different countries of the West.
A short story included among those given in Mitford’s “Tales of old Japan,” struck me when I first read it, as having a remarkable resemblance to one with which I had been familiar from my childhood—au Irish story first published by Crofton Croker about the year 1824 or 1825—and called the Legend of Knockgrafton. As I have unfortunately no copy of Crofton Croker’s work by me, I must tell this tale as well as I can from memory.
The Legend of Knockgrafton.
In some remote district in Ireland, but whereabouts I forget, is a village called Knockgrafton, near which are the
