When they are scared away by what is called exact intelligence from the tall forest of great personalities, they contrive to live humbly clinging to such bare plain stocks and poles (Tis and Jack and Cinderella) as enable them to find a precarious perch.
To drop similitudes, we must be prepared, in unravelling our tangled mythology, to go through several processes.

We must, of course, note the parallelisms and get back to the earliest attribution-names we can find.
But all system is of late creation, it does not begin till a certain political stage, a stage where the myths of coalescing clans come into contact, and an official settlement is attempted by some school of poets or priests.

Moreover, systematization is never so complete that it effaces all the earlier state of things.

Behind the official systems of Homer and Hesiod lies the actual chaos of local faiths preserved for us by Pausanias and other mythographers.

The common factors in the various local faiths are much the majority among the factors they each possess; and many of these common factors are exceedingly primitive, and resolve themselves into answers to the questions that children still ask, still receiving no answer but myth--that is, poetic and subjective hypothesis, containing as much truth as they can receive or their inventors can grasp.
Who were our forbears?
How did day and night, sun and moon, earth and water, and fire come?
How did the animals come?
Why has the bear no tail?
Why are fishes dumb, the swallow cleft-tail?
How did evil come?
Why did men begin to quarrel?
How did death arise?
What will the end be?
Why do dead persons come back?
What do the dead do?
What is the earth shaped like?
Who invented tools and weapons, and musical instruments, and how?
When did kings and chiefs first come?
From accepted answers to such questions most of the huge mass of mythology arises.