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Updated: November 14, 2025
This story has the peculiarity, that it occurs in the Arabian Nights as well as in so many European folk-tales. We know now that this is not true of Aladdin; and Zotenberg has traced all these extra tales of Galland to the oral recitation of his Christian dragoman Hanna.
And most folk-tales have a movement, a sweep, and an unaffectedness which make them splendid foundations for taste in style. For this, and for poetic presentation of truths in easily assimilated form, and because it gives joyous stimulus to the imagination, and is necessary to full appreciation of adult literature, we may freely use the wonder tale.
He says: "The dwarf is no over-ripe beauty who must keep her age secret. Rather something ridiculous must be done to cause him to laugh, because laughter brings deliverance." The problem set before the heroes of many folk-tales is to compel laughter, but that does not seem to be intended in these changeling stories. At least I have only met with it in one, and it certainly is not common.
The earliest folk-tales of every nation happen "once upon a time," and without any definite localization. In the "Gesta Romanorum," that medieval repository of accumulated narratives, the element of setting is nearly as non-existent as the element of background in the frescoes of Pompeii.
It is perhaps oftenest the love of a woman, clinging pertinaciously to her affection; but there are legends, too, of men, who do not save, however, that we remember, by long fidelity, but by ardour rather in overcoming obstacles. They kiss the fair enchanted one in the form of a hideous dragon and she is restored to beauty. One sees the simple philosophy of such folk-tales.
The incidents of the "hero sleeping by a rill", of the guarded king's daughter, with her thirty attendants, the king's son keeping sheep, are part of the regular stock incidents in European folk-tales.
Since magic and religion are practically the same in this society, the medium is the one who usually conducts or orders the magic rites; and for the same reason she, better than all others, can read the signs and omens sent by members of the spirit world. Magic and Omens. The folk-tales are filled with accounts of magical acts, performed by "the people of the first times."
Before Christianity came to reconstruct the folk-tales of the Thuringian peasants, the Horselberg was the home of Dame Holda, or Holle, and the horde of weird creatures which used to go tearing through the German forests on a wild rout in the Yuletide.
Division three contains the ordinary stories with which parents amuse their children or with which men and women while away the midday hours as they lounge in the field houses, or when they stop on the trail to rest and smoke. None of the folk-tales are considered as the property of the tellers, but only those of the third division are well known to the people in general.
This actual throwing of eyes occurs in the folk-tales of Europe generally. There can be no such name as Xailoun in Arabic; that of the noodle's wife, Oitba, may be intended for "Utba."
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