Note 178.2 — Chapter XXI · THE STORY AS A WHOLE. THE PROBLEM OF ITS PLACE OF ORIGIN. CONCLUSION.

If Mr. Jacobs be a disciple of M. Cosquin, he here diverges widely from his master, who has rightly insisted on the value of trivial details in proving the connection between two folktales belonging to the same cycle. His opinions on this point are gathered up in a small compass in a paper contributed to the International Folklore Congress of 1891, where he examines a number of stories of the rescue of a maiden from the monster, with a view to showing the repetition of minute details.178.2 One of the most curious and important of these details is the lousing of the hero by the maiden.179.1 In Table D I have brought together as many of such tales as I could find. Under the lady’s gentle fingers the hero usually falls asleep; and M. Cosquin points particularly to the fact that when the dragon comes on the scene the deliverer is in many variants aroused by the damsel’s tears. The table shows that this is, in fact, the usual method of awakening him; for it occurs in no fewer than fifty per cent. of the stories. But what will strike the reader is, that with the exception of a Portuguese tale from Brazil, all the stories in which it occurs are found within an area whose salient angles may be placed in Georgia, Nubia, and Bosnia. In only one of the variants from that part of the world can the mode of awakening be definitely said not to be by a tear, while in one other it is left uncertain. Now, it is not expressly said in every instance that the maiden performed the delicate office of lousing the hero; but I think that where this realistic trait has disappeared it has probably dropped out, in M. Cosquin’s phrase, “by an excess of delicacy on the part of the collector.” The trait is unquestionably a savage one. It is also one well known both in real life and in other stories to the peasantry, at all events of southern and eastern Europe, if not elsewhere. Outside the sphere centring in the Levant it is, however, found attached to the Rescue of Andromeda only in the Iberian peninsula, in Scotland, Ireland, and Sweden, the most numerous instances having been recovered in the west of Scotland. There, in four cases out of five, the lady awakens the hero by inflicting personal mutilation or bestowing personal adornments which afterwards serve to identify him, while in the fifth case the mode of awakening is not recorded. The phenomena both in the Levant and in Scotland are thus entirely in favour of the value of similar details as proving transmission. For, as M. Cosquin says, it is evidently impossible to believe that these details have been separately developed. The form under which the savage idea is presented must have been imported already specialised.