Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/276



. Publiés pour la première fois par et. (Société des Anciens Textes Français.) Paris, 1889, 8vo., pp. Ixxiv, 333.

and M. Paul Meyer have made students of folk-lore their debtors by their admirable edition of the exempla of Nicole Bozon, an English friar of the fourteenth century, who wrote down in Norman-French some 150 tales of the kind then considered suitable as seasoning for sermons. Members of the Folk-Lore Society should be especially interested in the book, as they are soon to have in their hands a very similar work, the exempla of Jacques de Vitry, edited by the capable hands of Prof. Crane.

These “Examples” form a necessary part of the apparatus of the student of folk-tales, for in them we often get the earliest appearance in literature of many folk-tales. Some of the examples, it is true, can be traced to purely literary sources, as, e.g., the beast-fables. But at times we come across tales evidently taken from oral tradition, with scraps of folk-rhymes repeated in them, and in other ways bearing marks of origin from the folk.

It cannot be said that Bozon’s Contes afford many examples of purely oral tradition. The industry of the editors has succeeded in tracing the sources of nearly every one of the stories. Some of these are well known, e.g., the Coffer-choice of the Merchant of Venice (§ 84); The Angel and Hermit, familiar to English readers from Parnell’s poem (§ 31); The Miller, his Son, and the Ass (§ 132). Others, not so well known, are often equally