Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/492

 450 Reviews.

human thought and institutions has been long and devious. We have not yet accumulated the material for a satisfactory synthetic philosophy of it ; and it may be that many years must elapse before we can approach the problems of such a philosophy with any hope of success. But Miss Kingsley has made a notable contribution to their solution ; and I regret that I cannot render justice to it in this meagre account.

What I could wish is that she had given us a more detailed and systematic statement of the differences between Negro and Bantu culture. This might throw much light on the development of the various types of Fetish. But perhaps it is one of the subjects she has still in reserve. The book is illustrated with two maps and some very good photographs.

E. Sidney Hartland.

The Home of the Eddic Poems, with special reference to THE Helgi-Lays. By Sophus Bugge, with a new intro- duction concerning Old Norse Mythology. Translated by William Henry Schofield. London : D. Nutt. 1899.

The veteran scholar who has done so much to promote northern studies gives us here his latest conclusions (carefully Englished by Mr. Schofield) on some of the more important of the Eddic poems. With his main contention, which is that arrived at years ago by his friend Gudbrand Vigfiisson, there is no need to quarrel ; it is obviously correct " that many of the old Norse myths are pre- served in a form not older than the Viking era, and that they were shaped by Scandinavian mythologic poets who associated with Christians in the British Isles, especially with the English and Irish . . . that the oldest, and indeed the great majority, of both the mythologic and heroic poems were composed by Nor- wegians in the British Isles, the greater number probably in northern England ; but some, it may be, in Ireland, in Scotland, or in the Scottish Isles . . . the old Norse poems which arose in the British Isles were carried, by way of the Scottish Isles, to Ice- land, and certainly in written form." Dr. Bugge is not backward in acknowledging the debt that all who study the Eddic poetry owe to his great forerunner in the field. Says he : " It was in the Scan- dinavian settlements in the British Isles, among Anglo-Saxons and