16 



seen to enter it. That this story was current before the mound was 

 opened is a fact beyond dispute. In 1832 the cairn was explored. Three 

 hundred cartloads of stones were removed, and beneath them was found a 

 skeleton ' laid at full length, wearing a corslet of beautifully wrought 

 gold, which had been placed on a lining of bronze.' The corslet in ques- 

 tion is of Etruscan workmanship, and is now, I believe, to be seen in the 

 British Museum.' 



Examples like these — and they stand by no means alone — inspire con- 

 fidence in the permanence of what seems so fleeting and evanescent. Folk- 

 lore is, in fact, like pottery, the most delicate, the most fragile of human 

 productions ; yet it is precisely these productions which prove more dur- 

 able than solid and substantial fabrics, and outlast the wreck of empires, 

 a witness to the latest posterity of the culture of earlier and ruder times. 



But if these traditions have thus been preserved for centuries and even 

 millenniums, they have lieen modified — nay, transformed — in the process. 

 It is not the bare fact which has been transmitted from generation to 

 generation, but the fact seen through the distorting medium of the popu- 

 lar imagination. This is a characteristic of all merely oral records of an 

 actual event ; and this it is which everywhere renders tradition, taken 

 literally, so untrustworthy, so misleading a witness to fact. The same 

 law, however, does not apply to every species of tradition. Some species 

 fall within the lines of the popular imagination ; and it is then not a dis- 

 torting but a conservative force. The essential identity of so many stories, 

 customs and superstitions throughout the world is a sufficient proof of this, 

 on which I have no .space to dwell. But their essential identity is over- 

 laid with external differences due to local surroundings, racial peculiari- 

 ties, higher or lower planes of civilisation. There is a charming story told 

 in South Wales of a lady who came out of a lake at the foot of one of the 

 Carmarthenshire mountains and married a youth in the neighbourhood, 

 and who afterwards, offended with her husband, quitted his dwelling for 

 ever and returned to her watery abode. In the Shetland Islands the tale- 

 is told of a seal which cast its skin and appeared as a woman. A man of 

 the Isle of Unst possessed himself of the seal-skin and thus captured and 

 married her. She lived with him until one day she recovered the skin, 

 resumed her seal-shape and plunged into the sea, never more to return. 

 In Croatia the damsel is a wolf whose wolf-skin a soldier steals. In the 

 Arabian Nights she is a, jinn wearing the feather-plumage of a bird, appa- 

 rently assumed simply for the purpose of flight. In all these cases the 

 variations are produced by causes easily assigned. 



The specific distinctions of a nation's culture are not necessarily limited 

 to changes of traditions which it may have ))orrowed from its neighbour* 

 or inherited from a common stock. It may conceivably develop traditions 

 peculiar to itself. This is a sulyect hardly yet investigated by students 

 of folklore. Their lalaours have hitherto been chiefly confined to estab- 

 lishing the identity underlying diveigent forms of tradition and explaining 

 the meaning of practices and beliefs by comparison of the folklore of dis- 

 tant races at different stages of evolution. But there are not wanting 

 those who are turning their attention to a province as yet unconquered, 

 and indeed almost undiscovered. Even if they only succeed in establish- 

 ing a negative, if they show that all traditions supposed to be peculiar 



' Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, p. 431, citing Archcrolngia and Arch. 

 Cambrensis. 



