Folktales and Saints’ Lives

---~ - ---~--- -200 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY most authoritative account we have now of the facts of Berkeley's life. The _personality, however, remains provokingly elusive-partly, perhaps , because the author is out to defend Berkeley, and is thus preoccupied with too narrow an aspect of his character. "On the stage and in popular tradition," Professor Luce says, "he is an eccentric, an oddity, and people smile at the mention of his name. Even wellinformed biographies convey the impression that he was an amiable fool, with 'every virtue under heaven,' save commonsense.,, The caricature created in Grub Street has stuck, and Professor Luce is much concerned to destroy it. The tar-water project, for example, is one of the standing jokes about Berkeley. Professor Luce places the affair in correct perspective, so that there is little in it that does not do as much credit to Berkeley's head as -to his heart, and certainly nothing is left to smile at. Professor Luce's "man of affairs, sane, shrewd, efficient,"· is firmly delineated-but there are many such men. That Berkeley was an unusual man, even if not an eccentric or an oddity, hardly appears in these pages. Perhaps he emerges most clearly as a person in the charming descriptions supplied by Professor Luce of the domestic life of the saintly hedonist in his later years at Cloyne. FOLKTALES AND SAINT,S' LIVES* CHARLES W. DuNN Folktales are among the most universal of human possessions. Although depending for their survival primarily upon circula,tion by word of mouth, they have been recorded in rthe earliest lirt:ercvtures of the world, and presumably ·they circulated at periods long prior to the invention of writing. Readers unacquainted with folklore study will be surprised to learn from Stith Thompson's The Folktale how thoroughly they have been catalogued and examined. Professor Thompson, who has made Indiana University one of the chief centres of folklore study in the Un~ted States, is certainly qualified ~to write on the subjeot. In 1928 he published The Types of the Folktale, a!translation, considerably augmented, of the index prepared by the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne; and between 1932 and 1936 he published his six-volume .Afotif-lndex of Folk Literature. A summary of the scope of these useful, though relat·ively unfamiliar, works must be included in -any reviewer's introduction of Thompson,s latest study to its many potential readers. *The Folktale. By STJTH THOMPSON. New York: Dryden Press [Toronto: Ryerson]. 1946. Pp. x, 510. ($6.75) , White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend. By C. GRANT LooMIS. Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America. 1948. Pp. 250. ($5.00) REVIEWS 201 The first index lists distinctive folktale types or plots under identifying numbers, such as Type 510, Cinderella; and it provides bibliographical references by means of whi·ch, in the case of Cinderella, for instance, ,the investiga:tor may locate literally hundreds of cognate versions of the tale circulating at various dates in various parts of Asia and Europe, and innumerable derivative versions borrowed by remote ethnic groups in Africa and America. (For purposes of cultural history, the distinction between cognates and derivatives is just as crucial in folklore as 'in etymology, a faot which might ·profitably ·have been enlarged upon in the book under review. Disregard of the principle leads to the fallacy, exhibited even in this .century by some classicists, unnamed unsha 1 rned, who have automa;tically assumed that the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus must be derived from Greece simply because Herodotus narrates a -cognate legend which he heard told in Persia about Cyrus.) On the basis of Thompson's classification numerous exhaustive inventories of the folktales circulating in certain areas, such as R. S. Boggs'.s Index of Spanish Folktales> have subsequently been published. Thompson's M otif-lndex carries analysis still further. The distinctive motifs or !incidents customarily appearing wirt:hin the·folktale rtypes are listed, with copious bibliographical references, under individual headings, ~uch as Motif S31, Cruel stepmother, which appears ~n many versions of the Cinderella story and in scores of other folktales . (Stepmothers have a very bad international reputation, worse in fact than that attached...