ASHIEPATTLE: OR HANS SEEKS HIS LUCK 55 



are introduced to goose-girls, to swineherds, to women 

 who spend their time amid cows and goats, and men 

 who chop wood and hunt. If the craftsman comes in, 

 it is the craftsman of the village community, the black- 

 smith, the tailor, or the miller. If we go into towns 

 and palaces, it is the simpleton and country lad who 

 takes us there ; we do not deal with ships and mer- 

 chandise, but with agricultural produce and the trophies 

 of the chase. Cathedrals and knights and men in 

 armour are not of our company. If we want advice or 

 sympathy we seek it not of priests or lawyers, of bailies 

 or Amtmanner ; we go to the animals, to a weise 

 Frau or a Hexe. With the exception of kings, to be 

 referred to later, the Schultheiss, or elected head of a 

 peasant community, is almost the chief authority we 

 come across. In short, the people who developed the 

 Teutonic Miirchen, as we know it in our Grimm, were 

 not a town population, but one living by agriculture 

 and hunting ; not a people of the mountains, the 

 snows, and the lakes, but a people living rather in the 

 clearings of the forest ; a people with a primitive agri- 

 culture, chiefly conducted by women ; a people to 

 whom the witch and wise woman, rather than the priest 

 and knight, were the guides and instructors in life. 

 The Marchen have been added to, developed, modified ; 

 all sorts of later elements and personages have been 

 grafted on to them, but, taken in the bulk, we see quite 

 clearly that they are not the production of an age 

 which knew Christianity and chivalry. They might 

 have been evolved among; the Germans whom Tacitus 



o 



describes for us, but they could not be the product of 



