But Mannhardt goes farther. He not only recognises, as everyone must do,
the Sun, as explicitly named, when he plays his part in myth, or popular
tale (Marchen). He thinks that even when the Sun is not named, his
presence, and reference to him, and derivation of the incidents in
Marchen from solar myth, may sometimes be detected with great probability
(pp. 326, 327). But he adds, 'not that every Marchen contains a
reference to Nature; that I am far from asserting' (p. 327).

Now perhaps nobody will deny that some incidents in Marchen may have been
originally suggested by nature-myths. The all-swallowing and
all-disgorging beast, wolf, or ogre, may have been derived from a view of
Night as the all-swallower. But to disengage natural phenomena,
mythically stated, from the human tangle of Marchen, to find natural
phenomena in such a palimpsest as Perrault's courtly and artificial
version of a French popular tale, is a delicate and dangerous task. In
many stories a girl has three balls--one of silver, one of gold, one of
diamond--which she offers, in succession, as bribes. This is a perfectly
natural invention. It is perilous to connect these balls, gifts of
ascending value, with the solar apple of iron, silver, and gold (p. 103
and note 5). It is perilous, and it is quite unnecessary. Some
one--Gubernatis, I think--has explained the naked sword of Aladdin, laid
between him and the Sultan's daughter in bed, as the silver sickle of the
Moon. Really the sword has an obvious purpose and meaning, and is used
as a symbol in proxy-marriages. The blood shed by Achilles in his latest
victories is elsewhere explained as red clouds round the setting Sun,
which is conspicuously childish. Mannhardt leans, at least, in this
direction.