Page:Crane Italian Popular Tales.djvu/19

Rh that Pitrè's collection surpasses all that has previously been done in this field. It is a monument of patient, thorough research and profound study. Its arrangement is almost faultless, the explanatory notes full, while the grammar and glossary constitute valuable contributions to the philology of the Italian dialects. In the Introduction the author, probably for the first time, makes the Sicilian public acquainted with the fundamental principles of comparative mythology and its relation to folk-lore, and gives a good account of the Oriental sources of the novel. He has, it seems to us, very properly confined his notes and comparisons entirely to Italy, with references of course to Gonzenbach and Köhler's notes to Widter-Wolf when necessary. In other words, his work is a contribution to Italian folk-lore, and the student of comparative Aryan folk-lore must make his own comparisons: a task no longer difficult, thanks to the works of Grimm, Hahn, Köhler, Cox, De Gubernatis, etc. The only other collection that need be mentioned here is the one in the Canti e Racconti del Popolo italiano, consisting of the first volume of the ''Novellino pop. ital.'' pub. ed ill. da Dom. Comparetti, and of Visentini's Fiabe Mantovane. The stories in both of the above works are translated into Italian. In the first there is no arrangement by locality or subject; and the annotations, instead of being given with each story, are reserved for one of the future volumes,—an unhandy arrangement, which detracts from the value of the work.

We will now turn our attention from the collections themselves to the stories they contain, and examine these first as to their form, and secondly as to their contents.

The name applied to the popular tale differs in various provinces, being generally a derivative of the Latin fabula. So these stories are termed favuli and fràuli in parts of Sicily, favole in Rome, fiabe in Venice, foe in Liguria, and fole in Bologna. In Palermo and Naples they are named cunti, novelle and novelline in Tuscany, esempi in Milan, and storie in Piedmont.11 There are few peculiarities of form, and they refer almost exclusively to the beginning