II. POPULAR PROSE FICTIONBY PROFESSOR F. N. ROBINSON
THE WORKS to be dealt with in the present lecture are widely separated in time and place. They include “Æsop’s Fables,” a collection which bears the name of a Greek slave of the sixth century, but is actually a growth of many generations before and after him; the “Arabian Nights,” which contains Oriental stories of diverse origin; the sagas of mediæval Ireland, as represented by “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel”; and the folk origin; the sagas of mediæval Ireland, as represented by the Grimms or imitated by Hans Christian Andersen. In so broad a range of writings there is naturally great variety of matter and style, and there might seem at first to be few common characteristics. But all the works mentioned—or all except Andersen’s tales—are alike in being popular prose fiction, and Andersen’s collection is an artistic imitation of similar productions.