The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

764.
The Hiohland Monthly.
NOTES.
Mr Alfred Nutt has sent us a paper delivered by him
before the Folklore Congress on the " Problems of Heroic
Legend," which is to appear in the forthcoming transactions
of that body. The paper is a marvel of condensation, and
we cannot in a paragraph even indicate Mr Nutt's views.
He points out that the anthropological school have done
much to unravel the mysteries of the folk-tale by studying
its appearances a^ong modern uncivilised races; and
he thinks that the problem of the hero-tale may
receive light from the same source. He discusses
the relationship of the heroic legends to real history,
and shows, in the case of the great Germanic sagas,
how distorted and utterly false our idea of King Attila and
his contemporaries would be if we had only the heroic
sagas to go upon. He says— " Had we heroic legend
alone, we should know worse than nothing of history, we
could only guess at false history. History may seem to
give the form and framework of heroic legend, the vital
plastic organic element is furnished by something quite
different. Myth, like a hermit-crab, may creep into the
shell of history, none the less does it retain its own nature."
He illustrates his positions mostly by Celtic myth, and,
besides the Siegfried saga and its class, discusses the
miraculous birth of the hero— a feature equally prominent
in Celtic as in Grecian myth—and the father and son
combat, which appears in the story of Cuchulinn and his
son Conlaoch. The Persians have a like myth, in the case
of Soohrab and Rusten ; but indications of it exist on
Greek and Germanic ground. A very striking inverse
parallel, so to speak, occurs in the legends of the Indians
of British Guiana, where the son, born and reared in similar
ciicumstnnces to Conlaoch, kills his father, " unknowing
and unknown" Mr Nutt is inclined to believe that heroic
legend originates mostl)' in nature myths, but that, as in
the Ossianic or Fenian saga, history may influence its final
form, just as the Norse invasions coloured the later
mediaeval form of our Ossianic story. So far as folklore
scientists are at present agreed on the question of the
origin and development of hero and folk tales, we think
that the theory which holds the field ma\' be expressed in
Topsy's words, when a similar question was put to her, and
hor answer was—•''
I specs I growed."