16 



scon to enter it. That this story was current before the mound w£ 

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

 hundred cartloads of stones were removed, and beneath them was found fi" 1 ' 1 

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

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

 tion is of Etruscan workmanship, and is now, I believe, to be seen in tbil* 1 

 British Museum. 1 



Examples like these — and they stand by no means alone — inspire cor J 

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

 lore is, in fact, like pottery, the most delicate, the most fragile of huma: I 

 productions : yet it is precisely these productions which prove more duii 

 able than solid and substantial fabrics, and outlast the wreck of empire* f ^ 

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



But if these traditions have thus been preserved for centuries and evei 1 is' 

 millenniums, they have been modified — nay, transformed — in the process j f 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 customs and superstitions throughout the world is a sufficient proof of this.] At 

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

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

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

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

 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 off! 

 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,i 

 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 thei 

 Arabian Nights she is &yinn 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 borrowed from its neighbours 

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

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

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

 lishing the identity underlying divergent forms of tradition and explaining j 

 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 j 

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

 and indeed almost undiscovered. Even if they only succeed in establish- 1 

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



1 Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, p. 431, citing Arcliceologia and Arch. 

 Camdre?isis. 



