Up to 1870, it was equally said of France and of Italy that they possessed no folk-tales. Yet, within fifteen years from that date, over 1000 tales had been collected in each country. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
Permanent bonds of culture began to be formed between the extreme East and the extreme West of Europe by intermarriage, by commerce, by the admission of the nobles of Byzantium within the orders of chivalry. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
I have come to the conclusion that a goodly number of the fables that pass under the name of the Samian slave, Aesop, were derived from India, probably from the same source whence the same tales were utilised in the Jatakas, or Birth-stories of Buddha. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
Certainly there is abundant evidence of the early transmission by literary means of a considerable number of drolls and folk-tales from India about the time of the Crusaders. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
Obscure as still remains the origin of that ‘genre’ of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters is all but dead; in the Land of Ind, it still flourishes in all the vigour of animism. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
The words ‘fairy tales’ must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something ‘fairy,’ something extraordinary – fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
In 1893, Miss M. Roalfe Cox brought together, in a volume of the Folk-Lore Society, no less than 345 variants of ‘Cinderella’ and kindred stories showing how widespread this particular formula was throughout Europe and how substantially identical the various incidents as reproduced in each particular country. Joseph Jacobs Read Quote
