the child nestled in his father's arms.[1] He is the piper of Hameln,[2] who drives away the noisome rats, but who also draws the children of the town happy and joyous to the blue river where they leave all griefs behind them, as gently as the Homeric Psychopompos guides the souls across the waters of Lethe. But in all his offices he retains his character of searching subtlety. The barred gates of the unseen land cannot stay the harping breeze, whether he comes as Orpheus or Wäinämöinen: and his curious searching into every nook and cranny, his mocking laugh at those who come to see the mischief wrought by him, are reproduced under a strange disguise in Paul Pry and Peeping Tom of Coventry. Nay, the Hindu deity Rudra, the "bountiful," the "gracious," the "thousand quivered," appears sometimes in an aspect scarcely more dignified. Like Hermes and the Shifty Lad, he too is "the lord of thieves, the robber, the cheater, the deceiver, the lord of pilferers and robbers."[3]
Limits to the hypothesis of conscious borrowing.Thus, then, in the story of the Master Thief, the idea of any lateral transmission becomes inadmissible. But as this tale in all its modifications can be traced back to phrases denoting physical phenomena, we have yet to see whether there are other tales which apparently cannot be resolved into such expressions, and for which the idea of any such borrowing is equally untenable or superfluous. If any such stories be forthcoming, we cannot avoid the conclusion that before the several brandies of the Aryan race separated from their common home, they not only had in their language the germs of all future mythological systems, but carried with them as nursery tales a number of stories not evolved from phrases descriptive of natural phenomena, the ideas of which were impressed on their minds not less firmly than the more strictly mythical words and phrases were impressed on their memories. These stories were, however, little more than outlines, for it cannot be too often repeated that even
- ↑
"Hörest du nicht
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?"Goethe.
- ↑ The magic pipe or lyre reappears in the legend of "The Rose of the Alhambra," where it is applied with great humour to cure the mad freak of Philip V.—Irving's Alhambra.
- ↑ Muir, Sanskrit Texts, part iv. ch. iii. section vii. Slightly altered, the story of Godiva in Coventry is told again in the tale of Allah-ud-deen, who sees through a crevice the king's daughter on her way to the bath, when it is death for any one to be seen abroad or to be found looking on her.
but in few or none of these can it be maintained with any show of reason that one has been deliberately adapted from another. The fiddle which makes the Jew dance is reproduced in the form of a stick in "The Lad who went to the North Wind" (Dasent, Norse Tales, 263). The stick is of course the gift of the wind, just as Hermes gives the harp to Phoibos. In the German story the Jew is made to yield up his purse to the fiddler, who, when brought to trial, excuses himself by a quibble like that of Hermes. He had not robbed any one: the Jew gave the money of his own free will. Hermes is a very truthful person and knows not how to tell a lie.
