In Chapter VI we saw that the heroic poetry of the Teutonic peoples was very largely affected by folk-tales; that supernatural beings were frequently introduced, while ordinary human beings or animals were credited with supernatural properties–in short that the distinction between natural and supernatural was not clearly drawn. We saw further that these features were by no means confined to the later stages of heroic poetry–that on the contrary some of them were prominent even in the Anglo-Saxon poems, while the others appeared to be of equal antiquity.

The same phenomena appear in Greek heroic poetry. Mythical beings and features obviously derived from folk-tales figure quite as frequently as in the Teutonic poems. Their presence is often regarded as a proof that the stories into which they enter and the persons with whom they are brought into contact are themselves products of myth or fiction. This is a question with which we shall have to deal in the following chapters. For the present it will be sufficient to quote what may be regarded as a typical expression of the attitude of more cautious scholars towards the problem of the story of Troy: “It is fantastic to treat the siege of Troy as merely a solar myth–to explain the abduction of Helen by Paris as the extinction of the sunlight in the West, and Troy as the region of the dawn beset and possessed by the sunrise. It is equally fantastic, and more illogical, to follow the rationalising methodto deduct the supernatural element, and claim the whole residuum as historical fact. Homer says that Achilles slew Hector with the aid of Athene. We are not entitled to omit Athene, and still to affirm that Achilles slew Hector.”