(3) The same plot and incidents, as they existed in heroic epics of cultivated people.  A local and historical character was given by the introduction of known places and native heroes.  Tone and manners were refined by literary workmanship, in the Rig Veda, the Persian King-book, the Homeric Epics, etc.

The Grimms noted that the evolution of the tale was from a strongly marked, even ugly, but highly expressive form of its earlier stages, to that which possessed external beauty of mold.  The origin is in the fancy of a primitive people, the survival is through Maerchen of peasantry, and the transfiguration into epics is by literary artists.  Therefore, one and the same tale may be the source of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, also of a Greek myth, and also of an old tale of illiterate peasantry.  This was the opinion held by Lang, who said, “For the roots of stories, we must look, not in the clouds but upon the earth, not in the various aspects of nature but in the daily occurrences and surroundings, in the current opinions and ideas of savage life.”

In the savage Maerchen of to-day, the ideas and incidents are the inevitable result of the mental habits and beliefs of savages.  We gain an idea of the savage mind through Leviticus, in the Bible, through Herodotus, Greek and Roman geographers, Aristotle, Plutarch, Pliny, etc., through voyagers, missionaries, and travelers, and through present savage peoples.  Savage existence is based on two great institutions:—­

(a) The division of society into clans.—­Marriage laws depend on the conception that these clans descend from certain plants, animals, or inorganic objects.  There was the belief in human descent from animals and kinship and personal intercourse with them.

(b) Belief in magic and medicine-men, which resulted in powers of metamorphosis, the effect of incantation, and communion with the dead.—­To the savage all nature was animated, all things were persons.  The leading ideas of savage peoples have already been referred to in the list of motifs which appear in the different fairy tales, as given by Lang, mentioned under the “Preparation of the Teacher,” in The Telling of the Tale.

II.  Fairy tales are myths of Sun, Dawn, Thunder, Rain, etc.

This is sometimes called the Sun-Myth Theory or the Aryan Theory, and it is the one advocated by Max Mueller and by Grimm.

The fairy tales were primitive man’s experience with nature in days when he could not distinguish between nature and his own personality, when there was no supernatural because everything was endowed with a personal life.  They were the poetic fancies of light and dark, cloud and rain, day and night; and underneath them were the same fanciful meanings.  These became changed by time, circumstances in different countries, and the fancy of the tellers, so that they became sunny and many-colored in the South, sterner and wilder in the North, and more home-like in the Middle and West.  To the Bushmen the wind was a bird, and to the Egyptian fire was a living beast.  Even The Song of Six-Pence has been explained as a nature-myth, the pie being the earth and sky, the birds the twenty-four hours, the king the sun, the queen the moon, and the opening of the pie, day-break.