Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/121

Rh valuable for scientific purposes; and if we have to be thankful, as we are and must be, on behalf of English students, to have thus much from works so inaccessible as those in the different Magyar dialects, we cannot help regretting that, instead of extracts from several, the whole of one or two of the collections referred to by the translators should not have been accorded us. Given the principle of selection, however, the translators have gone about their task in a scientific fashion, and the introduction and notes add greatly to the services they have here rendered.

This cannot be said of Mr. Wratislaw’s Sixty Folk-tales from Slavonic Sources. His notes (happily of no large extent) have been written to all appearance in entire ignorance of any other theory of interpretation than that of Max Müller and Cox. As in the case of the Magyar tales just mentioned, Mr. Wratislaw has chosen only a few out of the vast treasure of Slavonic märchen and sagas. It is too much, of course, to expect that any one scholar, or indeed any dozen scholars, will give us the whole; but would it not be possible by co-operation to obtain trustworthy abstracts of all the published stories of the Slav tribes? I can hardly think of any work that would be more useful.

Mr. Clouston’s Group of Eastern Romances has been so recently noticed that in these pages I need not do more than refer to it as affording a considerable amount of interesting material. I pass on therefore to two small French collections in Maisonneuve’s well-known series. New ground has been broken by Messrs. Carnoy and Nicolaides in their Traditions Populaires de l’Asie Mineure. In so far as the stories are concerned it consists of forty-one examples of märchen, sagas, apologues, and drolls. Many of the variants here found are curious; and when we consider the history of the western shores of Asia Minor and the islands adjacent, it is evident that the partisans of no theory of interpretation can afford to neglect them. The editors give, as a guarantee of good faith, particulars of the