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Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Sir George Douglas, Bart.
There is a very large Introduction to this book and here is how it starts...
It is only within comparatively recent years that the homely stories in the mouths of the country-people have been constituted a brunch of learning, and have had applied to them, as such, the methods and the terminology of science. No doubt a very noteworthy gain to knowledge has resulted from this treatment,—a curious department of research has been opened up, and light has been cast upon various outside things of greater importance than the subject of study itself. But, side by side with this gain to knowledge, is there not, involved in the method of treatment indicated, a loss to the stories themselves?
Classified, tabulated, scientifically named, they are no longer the wild free product of Nature that we knew and loved:—they are become, so to speak, a collection of butterflies in a case, an album of pressed wild flowers. No doubt they are still very interesting, and highly instructive; but their poetry, their brightness, the fragrance which clung about them in their native air, their native soil, is in large measure gone! Well then,—with all due recognition of the value of the labours of the scientific folklorist, the comparative mythologist, whose work I would not for one moment be understood to undervalue,—is there not room, even at the present day, to study these stories from another point of view, and that the simplest and most obvious one—the point of view, I mean, of the story-teller pure and simple?
One would hope that the time had not yet come when the old tales, considered on their own merits, have entirely ceased to charm; and it is an undeniable fact that there are still persons among us who would regard it as a real and personal loss could they be made to believe that the ideal hero of their childhood, as he falls heroically, in a bloody battle, wounded to the death, is in reality a myth, or an allegory to embody the setting of the sun; and who would even feel themselves aggrieved could they, be brought to realise that the bugbear of their baby years—their own particular bugbear—is common also to the aborigines of Polynesia. So great is the power of early association. Well then, my proposal is to consider the Tales of the Scottish Peasantry simply from the literary, critical, or story-teller’s point of view,— from the point of view, that is, of persons who actually tell them, to whom they are actually told.
You can read the rest of this introduction and the first chapter at http://www.electricscotland.com/history/fairy/index.htm
Alastair
There is a very large Introduction to this book and here is how it starts...
It is only within comparatively recent years that the homely stories in the mouths of the country-people have been constituted a brunch of learning, and have had applied to them, as such, the methods and the terminology of science. No doubt a very noteworthy gain to knowledge has resulted from this treatment,—a curious department of research has been opened up, and light has been cast upon various outside things of greater importance than the subject of study itself. But, side by side with this gain to knowledge, is there not, involved in the method of treatment indicated, a loss to the stories themselves?
Classified, tabulated, scientifically named, they are no longer the wild free product of Nature that we knew and loved:—they are become, so to speak, a collection of butterflies in a case, an album of pressed wild flowers. No doubt they are still very interesting, and highly instructive; but their poetry, their brightness, the fragrance which clung about them in their native air, their native soil, is in large measure gone! Well then,—with all due recognition of the value of the labours of the scientific folklorist, the comparative mythologist, whose work I would not for one moment be understood to undervalue,—is there not room, even at the present day, to study these stories from another point of view, and that the simplest and most obvious one—the point of view, I mean, of the story-teller pure and simple?
One would hope that the time had not yet come when the old tales, considered on their own merits, have entirely ceased to charm; and it is an undeniable fact that there are still persons among us who would regard it as a real and personal loss could they be made to believe that the ideal hero of their childhood, as he falls heroically, in a bloody battle, wounded to the death, is in reality a myth, or an allegory to embody the setting of the sun; and who would even feel themselves aggrieved could they, be brought to realise that the bugbear of their baby years—their own particular bugbear—is common also to the aborigines of Polynesia. So great is the power of early association. Well then, my proposal is to consider the Tales of the Scottish Peasantry simply from the literary, critical, or story-teller’s point of view,— from the point of view, that is, of persons who actually tell them, to whom they are actually told.
You can read the rest of this introduction and the first chapter at http://www.electricscotland.com/history/fairy/index.htm
Alastair