‘Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen,Am Ende Fischer und Kahn;Und das hat mit ihrem SingenDie Lorelei gethan.’
‘Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen,Am Ende Fischer und Kahn;Und das hat mit ihrem SingenDie Lorelei gethan.’
‘Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen,Am Ende Fischer und Kahn;Und das hat mit ihrem SingenDie Lorelei gethan.’
‘Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen,
Am Ende Fischer und Kahn;
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
Die Lorelei gethan.’
From this point of view it is obvious that to save a sinking man is to snatch a victim from the very clutches of the water-spirit, a rash defiance of deity which would hardly pass unavenged. In the civilized world the rude old theological conception of drowning has long been superseded by physical explanation; and the prejudice against rescue from such a death may have now almost or altogether disappeared. But archaic ideas, drifted on into modern folk-lore and poetry, still bring to our view an apparent connexion between the primitive doctrine and the surviving custom.
As the social development of the world goes on, the weightiest thoughts and actions may dwindle to mere survival. Original meaning dies out gradually, each generation leaves fewer and fewer to bear it in mind, till it falls out of popular memory, and in after-days ethnography has to attempt, more or less successfully, to restore it by piecingtogether lines of isolated or forgotten facts. Children’s sports, popular sayings, absurd customs, may be practically unimportant, but are not philosophically insignificant, bearing as they do on some of the most instructive phases of early culture. Ugly and cruel superstitions may prove to be relics of primitive barbarism, for in keeping up such Man is like Shakespeare’s fox,
‘Who, ne’er so tame, so cherish’d, and lock’d up,Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.’
‘Who, ne’er so tame, so cherish’d, and lock’d up,Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.’
‘Who, ne’er so tame, so cherish’d, and lock’d up,Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.’
‘Who, ne’er so tame, so cherish’d, and lock’d up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.’