ABSTRACT
The folklore around the world has always brimmed with tales of little people, elf-like beings said to be like people but on a diminutive scale. Rather than having circulated orally for ages, they argued, the tales congealed into their canonical forms only at the time they were first printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The reason people trot them out in every social context in every corner of the globe is precisely because they compress so much wit and wisdom into such a compact delivery platform. Some criteria must have been used by the collectors and anthologists—often but not always the same individuals—to pick their proverbs from the mayfly swarms of others. Countries with the lowest levels of social dysfunction—as measured by rates of homelessness, unemployment, abortion, teen pregnancies, STDs, homicide, incarceration, divorce, and seventeen other factors—are invariably the most secular.
