IN THE last years of the nineteenth century the study of the folktale, as well
as of all other aspects of folklore, began a period of vigorous activity. We
have seen something of the mingled success and failure of the earlier students
ill this new field. They were pioneers opening up a virgin land where there
had been no boundaries surveyed and where there were no prospectors to
guide them. Is it any wonder that sometimes their newly found riches proved
to be fool's gold and that in their eagerness to grasp everything at once they
sometimes came forth empty-handed? Wilhelm Grimm, Benfey, Max
Müller, and Andrew Lang had all essayed to answer the fundamental ques-
tions as to the nature of the folktale, its origin and distribution, and though
representatives of each school still labored and wrote, it was clear that these
nineteenth century scholars had been premature in their dogmatisms.

Not enough was known about the folktale or any part of popular tradition
in the nineteenth century to permit the arrival at safe conclusions. The col-
lected material was still scanty, especially among primitive peoples, and yet
on this inadequate basis scholars with great names had ventured to gen-
eralize. Even if they did state their opinions as opinions and not as dogmas,
the weight of their names soon caused their younger disciples to overstep the
caution of their leaders. Thus a large part of the intellectual effort being
devoted to the study of folk tradition was leading in divergent directions
because it was based upon different assumptions.

And these assumptions were not really axiomatic, but, as later scholarship
has shown, extremely dubious. One group of students was staking everything
on the analogy between the development of the Indo-European languages
and that of Indo-European folktales and took it for granted that inheritance
from a common (linguistically determined) ancestry is the explanation for

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