Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/280

 242 Reviews.

ing and reproducing conventions of style and phraseology which must have been utterly meaningless to him.

No. 72 is an English tale had from Cornelius Price, a South Wales Gypsy. But it too begins : " There was a king and queen in the North of Ireland." Mr. Groome notes "a very West Highland ring about it." Quite so. It is obviously derived from a Gaelic story — Irish rather than Scotch I should say, and shows that Cornelius must have come in contact with Gaelic narrators.

Again, I should refer the Welsh Gypsy Green Man of Noman's land to its close Gaelic analogue, the Battle of Birds, rather than to any of the Continental variants, on account of the way in which the inimical magician is characterised and of certain tricks of phraseology which point to a Gaelic original. One of Mr. Groome's greatest finds was the Welsh Gypsy harper, John Roberts, to whom are due the two fine tales. No. 54, Jack and his Golden Snuff-box, and No. 55, An Old King and his Three Sons in England. Mr. Groome cannot accept Mr. Jacobs' assertion that the latter tale "is scarcely a good example" for his (Mr. Groome's) theory, and urges that another Welsh Gypsy variant has since turned up. I can only support Mr. Jacobs' view. The hero of the tale and his brothers find their way ultimately to the Castle of Mel vales, a name which to me reveals the influence of mediceval romance in its latest chapbook form, and almost certainly carries back this version of a widely-spread tale beyond the advent of the Gypsies in these islands. It is in fact such a version as, falling into the hands of the miserable English chapbook writers of the sixteenth century, gave us the oldest recorded form of Jack the Giant Killer.

Thus the British evidence exhibits the Gypsies as keen collectors and retellers of stories which they must have picked up here. In one case, they carry a Gaelic tale from Ireland or Scotland to South Wales, and out of Gaelic into English. In so far their power as a disseminating agency is vindicated, and I am quite prepared to believe that what they have done here they may have done elsewhere, and that as they have carried tales out of one speech-area of Britain into another, so they may have brought tales out of the Continent into Britain. But as regards European folk-tales as a whole I see no reason to hold that they introduced much, if any, new material; and I believe that if they carried tales with them from one linguistic district into another, it is because