Excerpt from The Ocean of Story, Vol. 6 of 10: Being C. H. Tawney's Translation of Katha Sarit Katha (or Ocean of Streams of Story)

For comparative purposes, and as a preliminary step, col lections of folk-tales might be divided into two main groups - viz. Those having a literary form or dress, and those recorded exactly as taken down from the mouths of the folk. By the former group I do not mean merely the output, so often worthless, of the industrious but unintelligent collector who publishes the naive tales of the peasant or savage tastelessly selected, rearranged, draped, and even, now and then, mis fitted with very artificial morals duly appended for the instruction of youth and as inappropriate as those invented by the mediaeval preachers to moralise very similar tales in their eacmpla. Many a valuable ingathering has been utterly spoiled for any use as evidence of diffusion or of origin by such well-meaning but unhallowed blundering, committed on the plea of making the tales suitable for the English nursery. But I have more in mind such publications as the H istoires on Contes da Tems Pass� of Perrault, whose first contes were in verse, like the tales of Somadeva; some have insisted that the boy Perrault fils was the real author and a faithful reporter of his nurse's stories, and that these were neither rewritten nor edited by his courtier father, the versatile man of letters and sycophant of Le Roi Soleil, but such features as the importation of the supernatural aid of the fairy godmother, found solely in the Perrault version of Cinderella and other tales, and there replacing the dead mother or the helpful beast or tree (which may or may not be a relncarnation of the mother) in most folk versions, seem decisive that Perrault's is a literary form of the M archen, and belongs to the first group. An example of the second group would be the famous Kinder and H ausmarchen of the Brothers Grimm.

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