nurses and grandmas, "reproduce the most subtle turns of
thought and expression, and an endless series of complicated
narratives, in which the order of incidents and the words of
the speakers are preserved with a fidelity nowhere paralleled
in the oral tradition of historical events. It may safely be
said that no series of stories introduced in the form of
translations from other languages could ever thus have
filtered down into the lowest strata of society, and thence
have sprung up again, like Antaios, with greater energy and
heightened beauty." There is indeed no alternative for us but
to admit that these fireside tales have been handed down from
parent to child for more than a hundred generations; that the
primitive Aryan cottager, as he took his evening meal of yava
and sipped his fermented mead, listened with his children to
the stories of Boots and Cinderella and the Master Thief, in
the days when the squat Laplander was master of Europe and the
dark-skinned Sudra was as yet unmolested in the Punjab. Only
such community of origin can explain the community in
character between the stories told by the Aryan's descendants,
from the jungles of Ceylon to the highlands of Scotland.

This conclusion essentially modifies our view of the origin
and growth of a legend like that of William Tell. The case of
the Tell legend is radically different from the case of the
blindness of Belisarius or the burning of the Alexandrian
library by order of Omar. The latter are isolated stories or
beliefs; the former is one of a family of stories or beliefs.
The latter are untrustworthy traditions of doubtful events;
but in dealing with the former, we are face to face with a
MYTH.