For the teller of folktales today as in the past, and in our western culture as well as among the most primitive tribes, the world of the human and of the animal are never far apart. In all parts of the world there exist tales in which it is extremely hard to tell whether the actor is really a human being or an animal. This ambiguous concept extends even to sacred stories which make up mythologies, so that many of the deities appear one day in the image of man and the next in the guise of a beast. For people accustomed to such an equivocal conception of the main actors in their fiction, it is no

wonder that a multitude of tales, many of them less serious in import than the mythologies, should show animal actors in all sorts of distinctly human situations. Sometimes folk tradition is very careful in its choice of animals, so as to make the human actions as nearly appropriate as possible. Thus, the bear is stupid, the fox sly, the rabbit swift and wily. But such careful workmanship in the composition of animal tales is not to be expected everywhere, and sometimes, because of religious associations or even from mere carelessness, the animal actions seem most inappropriate. And occasionally in the course of a long tradition the role of a particular animal completely changes. The clever fox of Europe, in the course of his long migration through Africa to Georgia, has become the dupe who lets Brer Rabbit use him as a riding horse.

As for the animal tales current in Occidental tradition, there seem to be four principal sources: (1) the literary fable collections from India; (2) the Aesop fables as they were elaborated, especially in the early Middle Ages; (3) the medieval literary animal tales brought together in the cycle of Reynard the Fox; and (4) the purely oral tradition, a very important part of which was developed in Russia and the Baltic states. The interrelation of all these streams of influence is extremely complicated, so that the writing of the history of a particular animal tale is often a matter of extraordinary difficulty. To be sure, many of the literary animal tales, particularly those known as fables, have remained entirely on the literary plane and have never become in any sense a part of the folklore of any people. For such stories, the historian needs only to make an adequate study of the appropriate documents. But a considerable number of the literary fables, and of the animal stories appearing in such a work as Le Roman de Renart, have been learned, in one way or another, by unlettered story-tellers and have become, in all essentials, a part of the authentic folk tradition.

For the purpose of our study of the oral folktale in Europe and Asia, we [p. 218] shall notice only those animal tales, of whatever ultimate source, which have thus found an actual place in folklore.