doctor takes a great fee from the wicked queen to say she will never
be well unless she has some of the Dun Bull's flesh to eat.

And now it is time to bring this introduction to an end, lest it
should play the Wolf's part to Odin, and swallow up the Tales
themselves. Enough has been said, at least, to prove that even
nursery tales may have a science of their own, and to show how the
old Nornir and divine spinners can revenge themselves if their old
wives' tales are insulted and attacked. The inquiry itself might be
almost indefinitely prolonged, for this is a journey where each turn
of the road brings out a new point of view, and the longer we linger
on our path, the longer we find something fresh to see. Popular
mythology is a virgin mine, and its ore, so far from being exhausted
or worked out, has here, in England at least, been scarcely touched.
It may, indeed, be dreaded lest the time for collecting such English
traditions is not past and gone; whether the steam-engine and
printing-press have not played their great work of enlightenment too
well; and whether the popular tales, of which, no doubt, the land was
once full, have not faded away before those great inventions, as the
race of Giants waned before the might of Odin and the Aesir. Still
the example of this very Norway, which at one time was thought, even
by her own sons, to have few tales of her own, and now has been found
to have them so fresh and full, may serve as a warning not to abandon
a search, which, indeed, can scarcely be said to have been ever
begun; and to suggest a doubt whether the ill success which may have
attended this or that particular attempt, may not have been from the
fault rather of the seekers after traditions, than from the want of
the traditions themselves. In point of fact, it is a matter of the
utmost difficulty to gather such tales in any country, as those who
have collected them most successfully will be the first to confess.