The ocean of story, being C.H. Tawney's translation of Somadeva's ...

xviii THE OCEAN OF STORY
distribution within the Indo-European area. 1 The extreme
Indianist position, such as that adopted by the late Emmanuel
Cosquin, is clearly untenable; nor is his favourite form of
argument that if a story, or even a part of a story, can be
paralleled in India, ancient or modern, India must necessarily
have given it birth for obvious reasons conclusive. Actually
I should hazard the guess that a great many of the North
Indian stories, the vocabulary of which is largely coloured
with Arabic, have relatively recently been brought to India
with Islam. 2
This raises another point, to which Mr Wright has drawn
attention the view which I once ventured to put forward 8
that while it is a romantic and attractive hypothesis that
oral tradition goes back to immemorial antiquity, scientific-
ally it is a pure assumption. An assumption it must be, for
it cannot, in the nature of things, be tested, and those who
prefer to follow the maxim omne ignotum pro magnifico are not
likely to be shaken by any consideration of probability. But
considerations there are, which suggest not only that it is an
assumption, but an improbable assumption. Such detailed
work at stories as I have done has been upon philological
material derived mainly from illiterate transmission, Greek
1 In his interesting Foreword to Vol. VI, my friend, Mr Wright, put
a question mark against the view that a self-contained Indo-European group
of stories exists. Now I believe that there are geographical, historical and
cultural reasons why it should exist, but the question whether it actually does
exist is susceptible, I think, of quite a simple test. Is it or is it not true
that if any two collections of folk-tales from any two countries within the
area are compared, the number and character of the correspondences between
them will be quite disproportionately larger than those to be observed between
either of the Indo-European collections and any collection of native stories
from elsewhere? The area has, of course, no impassable barrier round it,
but where stories radiate outside it
e.g. along
influence in the African continent it is rather noticeable how they diminish
the southward thrust of Arab
in frequency in proportion to their distance from the main area and how their
original form tends to become more completely submerged the farther they
are from home. In the East, I imagine that the proportion of Indo-European
stories in China, where they were carried by Buddhism, is relatively large.
A few have passed on to Japan and Korea.
2 See Folk-Lore, xxxiv, p. 1 29.
3 Ibid., pp. 124 foil.