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Updated: June 22, 2025
With regard to social affinities it will be interesting to note the Palaung folk-tale of the origin of their Sawbwa, which is reproduced in Sir George Scott's Upper Burma Gazetteer. The Sawbwa, it is related, is descended from the Naga Princess Thusandi who lived in the Nat tank on the Mongok hills and who laid three eggs, from one of which was born the ancestor of the Palaung Sawbwa.
Greenwood appeared to omit from his calculations the circumstance that Will MAY have been, not merely "a sharp boy" but a boy of great parts; and not without a love of stories and poetry: a passion which, in a bookless region, could only be gratified through folk- song, folk-tale, and such easy Latin as he might take the trouble to read.
Good as Grimm's Fairy Tales were, they had been collected and not created by the modern German; they were a museum of things older than any nation, of the dateless age of once-upon-a-time. When the English romantics wanted to find the folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in the small country of one of those small kings, with whom the folk-tales are almost comically crowded.
During all this discussion as to the causes of the similarity of folk-tale plots no attempt has been made to reconstitute any of these formulæ in their original shape. Inquirers have been content to point out the parallelisms to be found in the various folk-tale collections, and of course these parallelisms have bred and mustered with the growth of the collections.
It must, of course, always be remembered that, outside this common nucleus, each country or linguistic area has its own story-store, which is equally deserving of special investigation by the serious student of the folk-tale.
These incidents come in logically in the Master-Maid formula but are dragged in without real relevance into Cupid and Psyche; yet they occur as early as Basile where there is a dim reminiscence of the Oblivion Kiss. Cupid and Psyche is of special interest to the student of the folk-tale since it is a means of testing the mythological, the anthropological, and the Indian theories of its origin.
Thus, while deferring for a moment any insistence on the obvious points of parallelism with the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and the possibilities of Spiritual teaching inherent in the ceremonies, necessary links in our chain of argument, we are, I think, entitled to hold that, even when we pass beyond the outward mise-en-scene of the story the march of incident, the character of the King, his title, his disability, and relation to his land and folk to the inner and deeper significance of the tale, the Nature Cults still remain reliable guides; it is their inner, their esoteric, ritual which will enable us to bridge the gulf between what appears at first sight the wholly irreconcilable elements of Folk-tale and high Spiritual mystery.
Still a third theory to account for the similarity of folk-tale incidents was started by James A. Farrer and elaborated by Andrew Lang in connection with the general movement initiated by Sir Edward Tylor to explain mythology and superstition by the similar processes of savage psychology at definite stages of primitive culture.
In 1864 J. G. von Hahn, Austrian Consul for Eastern Greece, in the introduction to his collection of Greek and Albanian folk tales, made the first attempt to bring together in systematic form this common story-store of Europe and gave an analysis of forty folk-tale and saga "formulæ," which outlined the plots of the stories found scattered through the German, Greek, Italian, Servian, Roumanian, Lithuanian, and Indian myth and folk-tale areas.
Ibn Batutah's narrative of the demon lover and his mortal brides closely resembles a well-known type of folk-tale, of which versions have been found from Japan and Annam in the East to Senegambia, Scandinavia, and Scotland in the West. The story varies in details from people to people, but as commonly told it runs thus.
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