Blair Collection > Popular tales of the West Highlands > Volume 1

INTRODUCTION. SIX
together again ; and, though the original shape is hard
to find, the fragments may be recognized in books, and
wherever else they may now be found.
But as there are quiet spots in the world where
drift-wood accumulates undisturbed, so there are quiet
spots where popular tales flourish in peace, because no
man has interfered with them. In Spitzbergen, accord-
ing to the accounts given me by Norwegian bear
hunters, and adventurous Enghsh nobles, trees, such as
those occasionally found in Scotland, are piled in heaps.
Trees, logs, broken S23ars, and wreck, gather and bleach
and decay together, because there are no men on that
wild shore to use them. So in the islands where the
western " wanderers," " Albanich," settled down, and
where they have remained for centuries, old men and
women are still found who have hardly stirred from
their native islands, who sj^eak only Gaelic, and cannot
read or WTÌte, and yet their minds are filled with a
mass of popular lore, as various as the wi'eck piled on
the shores of Spitzbergen. If such as these get hold
of the contents of a story book, they seem unconsciously
to extract the incidents, and reject all the rest, — to select
the true wood, and throw away foreign ornament, just
as they chiiJ oft' the paint of a stranded mast, or scrape
the sea-weed off a log when they build it into a roof.
I have given one specimen of a story, which I beheve
to be derived from the " Ai-abian Nights," though it is
quite impossible that the man who told it to Hector
]\IacLean, and who told it to me also, in nearly the
same words, can have got it directly from any book ;
for he cannot read at all, and he does not understand
Enghsh.
I have found very little notice of these West High-
land prose tales in books, but they are referred to. In
1703, Martin says that his countrymen then told long