Greece and Rome we read of the three fate-spinners, the Moirai or Parcæ, and their Scandinavian counterparts appear in the Edda as the three wise women whose dwelling is near the spring under the world-ash Ygdrasill, the Norns who fix the lives of men. The explanation of these three mythic beings is that they are in personal shape the Past, Present, and Future, as is shown by the names they bear, Was, Is, Shall (Urdhr, Verdhandi, Skuld).

Stories are always changing and losing their meanings, and from age to age new bards and tale-tellers shape the old myths into new forms to suit new hearers. Considering how stories thus grow and change, one must expect their origins to be as often as not lost beyond recovery. While, as we have seen, it may be often possible to make out what they came from, this must be done cautiously. Clever writers are too apt to sit down and settle the mythic origin of any tale, as if this could be done by ingenious guessing. Even if it is nonsense and never was intended for anything else, the myth-interpreter can find a serious origin for it all the same. Thus a learned but rash mythologist declares that in our English nursery rhyme, "the cow jumped over the moon," is a remnant of an old nature-myth, describing as a cow a cloud passing over the moon. What is really wanted in interpreting myths is something beyond simple guessing; there must be reasons why one particular guess is more probable than any other. It would have been rash to judge that Prometheus the fire-bringer is a personification of the wooden fire-drill (p. 262), were it not known that the Sanskrit name of this instrument is pramantha; taken together, the correspondence of name and nature amounts to a high probability that we have got back to the real origin of the Prometheus-legend. We may choose another example from the mythology of India, in the story of Vâmana,

the tiny Brahman, who, to humble the pride of King Bali, begs of him as much land as he can measure in three steps, but when the boon is granted, the little dwarf expands into the gigantic form of Vishnu, and, striding with one step across the earth, another across the air, and a third across the sky, drives Bali down into the infernal regions, where he still reigns. This most remarkable of all the Tom Thumb stories seems really a myth of the sun, rising tiny above the horizon, then swelling into majestic power and crossing the universe. For Vâmana, the "dwarf," is one of the incarnations of Vishnu, and Vishnu was originally the Sun. In the hymns of the Veda the idea of his three steps is to be found before it had become a story, when it was as yet only a poetic metaphor of the Sun crossing the airy regions in his three strides. "Vishnu traversed (the earth), thrice he put down his foot; it was crushed under his dusty step. Three steps hence made Vishnu, unharmed preserver, upholding sacred things."

It remains to see how myths spread. Whenever a good story is told, whether real or made-up does not matter, it becomes part of the story-teller's stock, who puts to it any new name that will suit, and often succeeds in planting it not only in popular legend, but even in history. There is a fragment by Demaratus preserved in the collection of Stobæus, where there is related with Greek names, as an episode of the history of Arkadia, the grand story which we were taught as an event of Roman history, the legend of the Horatii and Curiatii. Roman history, it seems, only borrowed it from an earlier tale, much as modern Swiss history borrowed from older folklore the tale of the archer and the apple, to adorn their national hero, Tell. To show how legend is put together from many sources, historical and mythical, let us take to pieces

one of the famous children's tales of Europe. Blue Beard was a historical person. He was Gilles de Retz, Sieur de Laval, Marshal of France, nicknamed Barbe Bleue from having a beard of blue-black shade. Persuaded by an Italian alchemist that his strength could be restored by bathing in the blood of infants, he had many children entrapped for this hideous purpose into his castle of Champtocé on the Loire, the ruins of which are still to be seen. At last the horrible suspicions of the country folk as to what was going on were brought to proof, and the monster was burnt at the stake at Nantes in 1440. In all this, however, there is not a word about murdered wives. Indeed the historical Blue Beard, in his character of murderous monster, seems to have inherited an older tale belonging to the wife-murderer of Breton legend, Comor the Cursed, Count of Poher, whose name and deeds are set down to near a thousand years earlier, in the legendary chronicles which tell of him as a usurper and tyrant who married and murdered one wife after another, till at last when he had wedded and killed the beautiful Trifine, vengeance overtook him, and he was defeated and slain by the rightful prince. It is not easy to say whether this is a version of a yet older story, or whether there is a historical foundation for it; if Henry VIII. of England had lived in those times, such a legend might have gathered round his name. Other points of the modern Blue Beard appear already in the story of Trifine, her sending for aid to her kinsmen when she knows her danger, and her discovery of the murder of the former wives. This last, however, does not come to pass in the modern way; in the legend, Trifine goes down into the chapel to pray in the hour of need, and there the tombs of the four murdered wives open and their corpses stand upright, each with the knife or cord or what

ever she was murdered with in her hand. Instead of this powerful and ghastly scene, the modern version brings in the hackneyed episode of the forbidden chamber, which had long been the property of story-tellers for use on suitable occasions, and is to be found in the Arabian Nights. The old Trifine legend has a characteristic ending. Her wicked husband pursues her into the forest and cuts her head off, but St. Gildas makes her body carry it back to Comor's castle, which he overthrows by flinging a handful of dust at it, then he puts Trifine's head on for her again, and she retires into a convent for the rest of her life. The story-tellers of later times prefer a more cheerful if more commonplace finish.

The miracle-legend just quoted brings us back to the historical use of myth, which was spoken of earlier in this chapter. The story of St. Gildas bringing the fair Trifine back to her castle with her head in her hand, and his afterwards putting it back on her shoulders, is history. It records the intellectual state of the age when it was held edifying to tell such wonders of holy men, for holy men were believed able to do them. Old tales which seem extravagant to our minds are apt thus to have historical value by pointing back to the times when, seeming possible, they were made. This is true even of Æsop's fables. In the stage of thought when human souls are thought able to live in animals' bodies, when a wolf may have one's enemy's soul in him, or one's grandfather may be crawling on the hearth in the body of a snake, stories of rational beasts themselves seem rational. Among the Buddhists, where beast-tales early became moral apologues, they are told as incidents of the many births or transmigrations of the great founder of the religion. It was Buddha himself who, as a bird, took the bone out of the lion's throat, and was repaid by being told

that he was lucky to be so well out of it. It was Buddha who, born in the body of a peasant, listened to the ass in the lion's skin, and said he was but an ass. That millions of people should have this as part of their sacred literature is a fact of interest in the study of civilization, warning us not to cast aside a story as worthless, because it is mythical. For understanding the thoughts of old-world nations, their myths tell us much we should hardly learn from their history.