historical legends about inter-tribal clashes, outstanding chiefs, and so on were not covered by these cycles.
As the process of desacralization and demythologization evolved, archaic heroic fairy-tales also developed, first as esoteric myths for the uninitiated, on the basis of interaction of myths and local legends. The biographical episodes in myths about culture heroes have been mentioned above. These were short stories about their miraculous birth and heroic childhood, and about fantastic contacts with ghosts, reflecting ritual trials of the initiation type (the ritual of transition to puberty), Le., the process of the moulding of a hero. These 'biographical' motives oriented, as it were, towards a hero's private life, were then, in a fairy-tale, transferred from early ancestors—culture heroes-demiurges—to close ancestors and chiefs as well as to nameless characters who could even be ignored at the start of their lives by their tribesmen and could show no signs of hope for the heroic spirit
In the course of transition from a myth to a fairy-tale the mythical time of first creation was replaced by indeterminate fairy-tale time, and aetiological finales disappeared. (Aetiological myths are those about the origin ofc^^n properties of objects of nature.)
In the course of the further development and decay of the tribal system, greater importance was attached to wedding rituals that partly overshadowed those of initiation. In a well-developed fairy-tale, unlike in a myth, the hero's marriage turned from a kind of means (marrying a wonderful totem wife guaranteed hunter s luck or a crop) into the final goal, especially as wife-tsarevna used to bring along'halfa kingdom'; the hero's trials proved to be steps towards his getting married to the daughter of a chief or tsar.
In a well-developed fairy-tale the hero was depicted as a relatively passive person (the final transformation of this passive hero is the type of'half-wit' and 'stay-at-home) but his passivity was the reverse side of the activity of the magic forces which helped him to go through an ordeal (genetically—initiation), actually working for him. This decisive role of the magic assistant is a vivid sign of the fairy-tale proper. Therefore, the main ordeal of the hero of such a fairy-tale is necessarily preceded by a preliminary trial which results in the obtaining of magic help. In some fairy-tales the main ordeal is followed by a third trial for identification in order to make sure that it was the same man who had gone through the main ordeal Such a trinomial composition structure is especially typical of the European fairy-tale.
In the course of the decay of a tribe and its heirs—the so-called large family—the heroes of a fairy-tale were socially unfortunate orphans, brothers and sisters, stepsons, especially stepdaughters persecuted by their stepmother (a stepmother was originally thought to be the father s wife who was married in
98 Numbers 12-13