XXIV REYNARD THE FOX

day.1_ He connects eleven incidents into a Folk
History of the feud of the Wolf and the Fox,
constituting a definite chain of tradition, each
link of which is bound up inextricably with all
the rest. Here, then, it would seem we have
found among the Finnish folk of to-day the
actual Beast Epic which the French artist of
the twelfth century dressed up with his own
adornments seven centuries ago. But closer
investigation robs this thesis of most of its
plausibility. The chain does not occur in
Finland as a chain, but in separate links, so
that the epic character of the so-called chain
at once disappears. Many of the links, indeed,
occur, as some of my readers may remember,
in the tales collected from Uncle Remus by
Mr. J. C. Harris, so that it is impossible to
regard the existence of an original Folk Epic
as substantiated by Dr. Krohn’s ingenious
researches.

The interest of those researches lies in a
different direction. M. Sudre’s researches
have shown that in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries a series of folk-tales existed dealing

1K. Krohn, Die geografische Verbreitung einer modischen
Thiermarchenkette in Finnland. In Fennia, organ of the
Helsingfors Literary Society, vol. iv. pt. 4.