Haddon, "and in Torres Straits people have refused to tell me their names, though there was no objection to someone else giving me the information."[1] Mr. Clodd quotes examples of a similar feeling as prevalent in British Columbia, among the Abipones of S. America, the Fiji Islanders, the North American Indians, and the Negroes of Trinidad.[2] Here obviously stress is laid on the danger consequent on the act of giving your self away.
We see then that, if you are weak enough to put yourself in the worse position and give the enemy a point of vantage by carelessness or compliance, you are more or less at his mercy.
It is fatal to put yourself in the weaker position, and the converse holds good. If you know that a person is a suspicious character, the best thing to do is to take the bull by the horns.
ὁππότε κεν Κίρκη σ' ἐλάσῃ περιμήκεῖ ῥάβδῳ,
δὴ τότε σὺ ξίφοσ ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ
Κίρκῃ ἐπαῖξαι ὥς τε κτάμεναι μενεαίνων.[3]
Bogies are powerless before the lad who didn't know what fear was.[4] There is no need to quote all the examples of the Proteus type of story and that of the victory of a human warrior over a ghostly enemy. Against courage metamorphosis avails not, and to a Jacob or an Osbert spirit antagonists are forced to yield. He who has courage to rush upon a fairy festival and snatch from them their drinking cup or horn will find it prove to him a cornucopia of fortune.[5]
The secret of success is to be the aggressor, to assert
- ↑ Haddon, Magic and Fetichism, p. 22.
- ↑ Clodd, Tom Tit Tot, pp. 82, 84-85, 87.
- ↑ Homer, Odyssey, x., 293.
- ↑ Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 4, 121, 193, 195; cf. Croker, "The Legend of Knocksheogow," Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, vol. i., pp. 1-10.
- ↑ Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. ii., p. 276.
