besides very likely roots in the comtemplation of nature in times past. What is of interest here is not such a motive as possible expression for a view of the world belonging to a more primitive stage in the phase of development, but it is this episode as one of the poetical motives of a novel. Here the primitive has vanished, we treat certain poetical motives, motives which the teller hardly belives in, but which, after traditional custom must be used in this kind of a tale, for the tales are after all poetical compositions too, and in their lives, in a rich popular tradition, we have so to say an equivalent to the written sources with which the history of litterature deals even if the material as a link in a verbal tradition conforms to other laws than those reigning in the world of litterature.
As to a further planning out of a research like this is to be remarked: First the single parts of the material at hand must be presented and examined to enable us to separate the foreign and borrowed features, and decide what belongs to the underlying tradition. But such an original tradition is on quite another plane than the recent popular variants, and the result is that we cannot decide their place in the development, judging from their smaller or greater distance from the fundamental tradition. Therefore a new section must follov, where on earlier evidences, and from a general judgement of the variants as a whole, and after their geographic extension, it is attempted to follov the wanderings of the tales. So it is inevitable to touch on the same incident several times, but to the first investigation of motives belongs necessarily an investigation of the whole problem, in which the outer life, not the inner structure of the tale shall he fixed.
Before I conclude this preface I well render an account for a preliminary work to this study. After the appearance of a small article on „a few Epic Laws in two Sections of Tales“ (Danske Studier 1915 p. 71) where the tale at hand enters the
