Blair Collection > Beside the fire

POSTSCRIPT. Ivii
thereby liable to the necessities of death and decay inherent in all human
things ? Some scholars have a ready answer for this and similar questions.
The heroic epos assumed its shape once for all among one special race, and
was then passed on to other races who remained faithful to the main lines
whilst altering details. If this explanation were true, it would still leave
unsolved the problem, why the heroic epos, which for its fashioners and hearers
was at once a record of the actual and an exemplar of the ideal, should,
among men differing in blood and culture, follow one model, and that a tragic
one. Granting that Greek and Teuton and Celt did borrow the tales which
they themselves conceived to be very blood and bone of their race, what
force compelled them all to borrow one special conception of life and fate ?
Such exceptions as there are to the tragic nature of the heroic saga are
apparent rather than real. The Odyssey ends happily, like an old-fashioned
novel, but Fénélon long ago recognised in the Odyssey — " un amas de
contes de ^-ieille.
Perseus again has the luck of a fairy-tale prince, but then the story of his
fortunes is obviously a fairy-tale, with named instead of anonymous per-
sonages.
Whilst the fairy-tale is akin in tone to the god saga, the ballad recalls the
heroic epos. The vast majority of ballads are tragic. Sir Patrick Spens
must drown, and Glasgerion's leman be cheated by the churl ; Clerk Saunders
comes from the other world, like Helge to Sigrun ; Douglas dreams his dreary
dream, " I saw a dead man win a fight, and that dead man was I." The
themes of the ballad are the most dire and deadly of human passions ;
love scorned or betrayed, hate, and revenge. Very seldom, too, do the
plots of ballad and marchen cross or overlap. Where this does happen it
will, as a rule, be found that both are common descendants of some great
saga.
We find such an instance in the Fenian saga, episodes of which have lived
on in the Gaelic folk memory in the double form of prose and poetry. But it
should be noted that the poetry accentuates the tragic side — the battle of
Gabhra, the death of Diarmaid — whilst the prose takes rather some episode
of Finn's youth or manhood, and presents it as a rounded and complete whole,
the issue ol which is fortunate.
The relations of myth and epos to folk-lore may thus be likened to that of
trees to the soil from which they spring, and which they enrich and fertilise
by the decay of their leaves and branches which mingle indistinguishably with
the original soil. Of this soil, again, rude bricks may be made, and a house
built ; let the house fall into ruins, and the bricki crumble into dust, it will be
hard to discriminate that dust from the parent earth. But raise a house of
iron or stone, and, however ruined, its fragments can always be recognised.
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