Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/120

114 sagas—recalling Milton’s famous complaint concerning the history of the Heptarchy—amid much tedious matter, we may watch for ourselves how what is apparently a narrative of actual events passes gradually into the realm of imagination, and myth usurps the chair of fact.

This is the sort of inquiry undertaken by M. Rydberg with respect to Teutonic traditions. No one can open the recent translation of the first part of his work without being struck by the manner in which he tracks to its burrow and slays the mediæval tale of the Eastern origin and Trojan descent of Odin and his companions. The width of research and the acuteness here displayed are conspicuous in his treatment of other sagas. We may not accept all his conclusions. It may seem that often he deals with tales and songs but loosely connected with one another, as if they were inspired writings which had to be reconciled at the cost of any amount of special pleading. Yet, undeniably, the method he adopts has led him to brilliant conjectures, if not to discoveries, and neither the method nor the results can be safely dismissed unconsidered.

Among the collections of folk-tales published last year the most important, after the Maori tales, is the version of Magyar tales by Messrs. Jones and Kropf. This is the more welcome, because English readers have hitherto had to depend upon German translations, and these only too frequently unsatisfactory ones. It consists of a selection from the collections published by Erdélyi, Kriza, and Pap, with a single example from Merényi’s Popular Tales from the Valley of the Sajó—in all, fifty-three out of a total of 240 stories enumerated by Ladislaus Arany in 1867 as published up to that date. But although the translators state that the work of collecting has gone steadily on since that date, none of the more recent collections are represented in the book before us. We may assume that the examples given here are the most interesting, from the point of view of the general reader, of those published up to 1867. But we cannot assume that they are the most