Russian Fairy Tales

" ...]that, therefore, "these traditions are as much a portion of the common inheritance of our ancestors as their language unquestionably is: " 11] the other regarding at least a great part of them as foreign importations, Oriental fancies which were originally introduced into Europe, through a series of translations, by the pilgrims and merchants who were always linking the East and the West together, or by the emissaries of some of the heretical sects, or in the train of such warlike transferrers as the Crusaders, or the Arabs who ruled in Spain, or the Tartars who so long held the Russia of old times in their grasp. According to the former supposition, "these very stories, these Mahrchen, which nurses still tell, with almost the same words, in the Thuringian forest and in the ...].""