Oral transmission.  The tale, having originated, may have been transmitted in many ways:  by women compelled to marry into alien tribes; by slaves from Africa to America; by soldiers returning from the Crusades; by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land or from Mecca; by knights gathering at tournaments; by sailors and travelers; and by commercial exchange between southern Europe and the East—­Venice trading with Egypt and Spain with Syria.  Ancient tales of Persia spread along the Mediterranean shores.  In this way the Moors of Spain learned many a tale which they transmitted to the French. Jack the Giant-Killer and Thomas Thumb, according to Sir Walter Scott, landed in England from the very same keels and warships which conveyed Hengist and Horsa and Ebba the Saxon.  A recent report of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution of the United States expressed the opinion that the Uncle Remus Tales have an Indian origin.  Slaves had associated with Indian tribes such as the Cherokees, and had heard the story of the Rabbit who was so clever that no one could fool him.  Gradually the Southern negroes had adopted the Indian tales and changed them.  Joseph Jacobs claims to have found the original of the “Tar Baby” in the Jataka Tales.  A tale, once having originated, could travel as easily as the wind.  Certainly a good type when once hit upon was diffused widely.  Sir Walter Scott has said:  “A work of great interest might be compiled from the origin of popular fiction and the transmission of similar tales from age to age and from country to country.  The mythology of one period would then appear to pass into the romance of the next century, and that into the nursery tales of subsequent ages.  Such an investigation would show that these fictions, however wild and childish, possess such charms for the populace as to enable them to penetrate into countries unconnected by manners and language, and having no apparent intercourse to afford the means of transmission.”

Thomas Keightley, in Tales and Popular Fictions, has given interesting examples of the transmission of tales.  Selecting Jack the Giant-Killer, he has shown that it is the same tale as Grimm’s The Brave Tailor, and Thor’s Journey to Utgard in the Scandinavian Edda.  Similar motifs occur also in a Persian tale, Ameen of Isfahan and the Ghool, and in the Goat and the Lion, a tale from the Panchatantra.  Selecting the Story of Dick Whittington he has shown that in England it was current in the reign of Elizabeth; that two similar tales, Danish legends, were told by Thiele; that a similar Italian tale existed at the time of Amerigo Vespucci, which was a legend told by Arlotto in 1396-1483; that another similar Italian tale was connected with the origin of Venice, in 1175; and that a similar tale existed in Persia in 1300, before 1360, when Whittington of England was born.  He also pointed out that the Odyssey must have traveled east as well as west, from Greece, for Sindbad’s adventure with the Black Giant is similar to that of Ulysses with the Cyclops.