With regard to the Iberian race, it has only to be noted that its distribution in the south and west of Europe is very extensive. It is still almost wholly predominant in Spain and Portugal. It probably constituted in old times, as now, the main non-Aryan element in Mediterranean Europe. North-westward it has had a wide extension into France, Britain, and Ireland, and probably into Scandinavia and other countries; while it is not impossible that to it also belong in part the non-Aryan inhabitants of Hindustan.
Applying these facts to Germany, the Scotch Highlands, and Ireland, do we not obtain a hint as to the phenomenon of folk-lore distribution? One race, let us say mainly Aryan, in Germany; another race, much less Aryan, in the Scotch Highlands; a third, a more even blend of the two—of Aryan and non-Aryan—in Ireland.
This theory seems to me to be only such a modification of a theory which originally prevailed as is now required by the facts. It was at first believed, apparently is still believed by some, that all these tales originally belonged to the Aryans alone. As soon, however, as it was found that many of them were the possession of races far removed from Aryan contact, it was at once seen that a modification of view was imperative. Then came the independent origin theory; and, amongst others of later birth, one which has recently attracted much attention—the Indian theory. This seems to me to involve the truth of several propositions which are surely a little hard to accept. We must hold, first, that the Aryans, when they entered India, had no folk-tales, because, according to the hypothesis, they carried none elsewhere; next, that the tales were either invented by the Aryans after they entered India, or were learned by them from the earlier peoples of that country. But that tales of one country, or one race, should have had a peculiar ability to diffuse themselves, wanting to all others, is a proposition that tries one’s faith. Reverting again to the analogy already used, we know that there are animals common to India and Ireland whose original home was in neither country. There are men of the same Aryan descent by the Shannon and by the Indus whose ancestors had not their first common habitation by either river. And the folk-tales, so far as they are Aryan, did not originate south of the Himalayas, or west of the Irish Sea. But they cannot all be Aryan. Nothing could antecedently be more improbable than the suggestion that they were; and we might fairly regard it as refuted even if we had nothing to go on but the literary character of the tales. They bear the stamp of the genius of more than one race. The pure and placid but often cold imagination of the Aryan has been at work on some. In others we trace the more picturesque fancy, the fierceness and sensuality, the greater sense of artistic elegance belonging to races whom the Aryan, in spite of his occasional faults of hardness and coarseness, has, on the whole, left behind him. But as the greatest results in the realm of the highest art have always been achieved in the case of certain blends of Aryan with other blood, I should hardly deem it extravagant if it were asserted that in the humbler regions of the folk-tale we might trace the working of the same law. The process which has gone on may in part have been as follows:—Every race which has acquired very definite characteristics must have been for a long time isolated. The Aryans, during their period of isolation, probably developed many of their folk-germs into their larger myths, owing to the greater constructiveness of their imagination, and thus, in a way, they used up part of their material. Afterwards, when they became blended with other races less advanced, they acquired fresh material to work on. We have in Ireland an instance to hand, of which a brief discussion may help to illustrate the whole race theory.