Mannhardt on Marchen.

But Mannhardt goes farther.  He not only recognises, as everyone must do, the Sun, as explicitly named, when he plays his part in myth, or popular tale (Marchen).  He thinks that even when the Sun is not named, his presence, and reference to him, and derivation of the incidents in Marchen from solar myth, may sometimes be detected with great probability (pp. 326, 327).  But he adds, ’not that every Marchen contains a reference to Nature; that I am far from asserting’ (p. 327).

Now perhaps nobody will deny that some incidents in Marchen may have been originally suggested by nature-myths.  The all-swallowing and all-disgorging beast, wolf, or ogre, may have been derived from a view of Night as the all-swallower.  But to disengage natural phenomena, mythically stated, from the human tangle of Marchen, to find natural phenomena in such a palimpsest as Perrault’s courtly and artificial version of a French popular tale, is a delicate and dangerous task.  In many stories a girl has three balls—­one of silver, one of gold, one of diamond—­which she offers, in succession, as bribes.  This is a perfectly natural invention.  It is perilous to connect these balls, gifts of ascending value, with the solar apple of iron, silver, and gold (p. 103 and note 5).  It is perilous, and it is quite unnecessary.  Some one—­Gubernatis, I think—­has explained the naked sword of Aladdin, laid between him and the Sultan’s daughter in bed, as the silver sickle of the Moon.  Really the sword has an obvious purpose and meaning, and is used as a symbol in proxy-marriages.  The blood shed by Achilles in his latest victories is elsewhere explained as red clouds round the setting Sun, which is conspicuously childish.  Mannhardt leans, at least, in this direction.

‘The Two Brothers’

Mannhardt takes the old Egyptian tale of ‘The Two Brothers,’ Bitiou and Anepou.  This fable, as old, in actual written literature, as Moses, is a complex of half the Marchen plots and incidents in the world.  It opens with the formula of Potiphar’s Wife.  The falsely accused brother flies, and secretes his life, or separable soul, in a flower of the mystic Vale of Acacias.  This affair of the separable soul may be studied in Mr. Hartland’s Perseus, and it animates, as we shall see, Mr. Frazer’s theory of the Origin of Totemism.  A golden lock of the wicked wife’s hair is then borne by the Nile to the king’s palace in Egypt.  He will insist on marrying the lady of the lock.  Here we are in the Cinderella formula, en plein, which may be studied, in African and Santhal shapes, in Miss Coxe’s valuable Cinderella. {60} Pharaoh’s wise men decide that the owner of the lock of hair is (like Egyptian royalty at large) a daughter of the Sun-god (p. 239).  Here is the Sun, in all his glory; but here we are dealing with a literary version of the Marchen, accommodated to royal tastes and Egyptian ideas of royalty by a royal scribe, the courtly Perrault of the Egyptian Roi-Soleil.  Who can say what he introduced?—­while we can say that the Sun-god is absent in South African and Santhal and other variants.  The Sun may have slipped out here, may have been slipped in there; the faintest glimmer of the historical sense prevents us from dogmatising.