With such a table of contents in front of this little foreword, I am quite
sure that few will pause to consider my prosy effort. Nor can I blame any
readers who jump over my head, when they may sit beside kind old Baucis, and
drink out of her miraculous milk-pitcher, and hear noble Philemon talk; or join
hands with Pandora and Epimetheus in their play before the fatal box was opened;
or, in fact, be in the company of even the most awe-inspiring of our heroes and
heroines.
For ages the various characters told about in the following pages have
charmed, delighted, and inspired the people of the world. Like fairy tales,
these stories of gods, demigods, and wonderful men were the natural offspring of
imaginative races, and from generation to generation they were repeated by
father and mother to son and daughter. And if a brave man had done a big deed he
was immediately celebrated in song and story, and quite as a matter of course,
the deed grew with repetition of these. Minstrels, gleemen, poets, and skalds (a
Scandinavian term for poets) took up these rich themes and elaborated them.
Thus, if a hero had killed a serpent, in time it became a fiery dragon, and if
he won a great battle, the enthusiastic reciters of it had him do prodigious
feats—feats beyond belief. But do not fancy from this that the heroes were
every-day persons. Indeed, they were quite extraordinary and deserved highest
praise of their fellow-men.
So, in ancient and medieval Europe the wandering poet or minstrel went from
place to place repeating his wondrous narratives, adding new verses to his
tales, changing his episodes to suit locality or occasion, and always skilfully
shaping his fascinating romances. In court and cottage he was listened to [pg xiv] with breathless
attention. He might be compared to a living novel circulating about the country,
for in those days books were few or entirely unknown. Oriental countries, too,
had their professional story-spinners, while our American Indians heard of the
daring exploits of their heroes from the lips of old men steeped in tradition.
My youngest reader can then appreciate how myths and legends were multiplied and
their incidents magnified. We all know how almost unconsciously we color and
change the stories we repeat, and naturally so did our gentle and gallant
singers through the long-gone centuries of chivalry and simple faith.
Every reader can feel the deep significance underlying the myths we
present—the poetry and imperishable beauty of the Greek, the strange and
powerful conceptions of the Scandinavian mind, the oddity and fantasy of the
Japanese, Slavs, and East Indians, and finally the queer imaginings of our own
American Indians. Who, for instance, could ever forget poor Proserpina and the
six pomegranate seeds, the death of beautiful Baldur, the luminous Princess
Labam, the stupid jellyfish and shrewd monkey, and the funny way in which
Hiawatha remade the earth after it had been destroyed by flood?
Then take our legendary heroes: was ever a better or braver company brought
together—Perseus, Hercules, Siegfried, Roland, Galahad, Robin Hood, and a dozen
others? But stop, I am using too many question-marks. There is no need to query
heroes known and admired the world over.
As true latter-day story-tellers, both Hawthorne and Kingsley retold many of
these myths and legends, and from their classic pages we have adapted a number
of our tales, and made them somewhat simpler and shorter in form. By way of
apology for this liberty (if some should so consider it), we humbly offer a
paragraph from a preface to the "Wonder Book" written by its author:
"A great freedom of treatment was necessary but it will be observed by every
one who attempts to render these legends malleable in his intellectual furnace,
that they are marvelously independent of all temporary modes and circumstances.
They [pg xv] remain
essentially the same, after changes that would affect the identity of almost
anything else."
Now to those who have not jumped over my head, or to those who, having done
so, may jump back to this foreword, I trust my few remarks will have given some
additional interest in our myths and heroes of lands far and near.
Daniel Edwin Wheeler [pg 1]
|
