title: Voices from the Past: The Cycle of Life in Indo-European Folktales
author: D. L. Ashliman
description: A Guide to Folktales in the English Language: Based on the Aarne-Thompson Classification System by D.L. Ashliman is basically a bibliographical index lisitng both the Aarne-Thompson Classification System, as well as a detailed record of English-language folktale examples for each of the classification types. In the introduction, author D.L. Ashliman states that the first aim of A Guide to Folktales in the English Language: Based on the Aarne-Thompson Classification System is to help readers find reliable texts of any given folktale type, both familiar and less familiar variants
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  So Life's sad Sunset prizes  
  What Life's gay Dawn despises,  
  And always Winter wise is  
  When Summer is no more:  
  While Love than lightning fleeter  
  Turns all he touches sweeter,  
  To leave it incompleter  
  Behind him, than before.  
  
  
  
  
  
  Amara
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Years, looking forward, all too slow,  
  Yet looking back, too fast,  
  What is your joy, what is your woe,  
  But scented ash that used to glow,  
  A sandalwood of long ago,  
  A camphor of the past?  
  
  
  
  
  
  SULOCHANA
  
  
  
  
  
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  INTRODUCTION
  
  
  
  
  
  Four things are never far from you, in old Hindoo literature: underfoot, all
  round you, or away on the horizon, there they always are: the Forest, the
  Desert, the River, and the Hills.
  
  It is never very easy, to understand the Past that really is a past: and the
  age of Forests, like that of chivalry, is gone. But in the case of ancient
  India, the chief obstacle to understanding a