Volume Four brings Legend Land nearer to the great centres of modern life. It comprises some of the old stories told of districts within easy reach of such busy cities as London, Birmingham and Bristol.
In it you will find historic and pre-historic romance mingled. Some of its tales are as old as any in our land, tales born of the very ancient belief that saw in “Druid” stones a human origin. Other stories are romances of much later date, of events almost within the memory of our great-grandparents’ great-grandparents.
Here you will find two legends that come from Shakespeare’s land, legends that must have been well known to that great lover and teller of old tales. And in the legend of Herne the Hunter you will recognise a story which Shakespeare himself told in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” And it was probably an old tale when he repeated it.
In “King Arthur’s Camelot” you meet with a very old legend of that great hero of British historical romance; and in the story of “Wayland Smith” you get an echo of the lore of the old Pagan gods which invading Anglo-Saxon tribes brought to England soon after the Romans left it.
Manners and customs change; the old creeds die as the new ones arise, yet—and it is very wonderful to realize it—some of the old stories have survived every phase of the passing centuries’ intolerance of the past, and are told to-day in a form not so very different from that in which they were first narrated by our semi-savage ancestors, over their camp fires in the heart of primeval English forests.
But civilization is “improving” away romance very rapidly. And it is worth while to hang on fast to the last remaining shreds of those other days when life, though ruder, had more time for simple dreams of wonderful things.
LYONESSE