The truth is, my folk-lore friends and my Saturday Reviewer differ with me on the important problem of the origin of folk-tales. They think that a tale probably originated where it was found.
Every place but that in which one is born is equally strange and wondrous. Once beyond the bounds of the city walls, and none knows what may happen. We have stepped forth into the Land of Faerie, but at least we are in the open air.
Obscure as still remains the origin of that 'genre' of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.
Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.
One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity.
In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters is all but dead; in the Land of Ind, it still flourishes in all the vigour of animism.
