Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/510

 468 Reviews.

supplements the various fables, tales, and apologues contained in the MSS. which Professor Marr has consulted. They are arranged in separate groups according to the codex or codices in which they come. They have none of them appeared in the printed editions of Wardan, and Armenian students owe to Marr a debt of gratitude for placing at their disposal such a mass of unedited literary matter.

The first of Professor Marr's volumes contains his general examination of Armenian fable-literature. In the preface he pays homage to Baron Rosen, the Russian orientalist. Then follows an introduction of 41 pages, in which he mentions recent publications bearing on the subject and gives a list of the con- tents of each of the 583 sections which follow. In the first 54 of these sections the author examines the relation of the Armenian collection known as Wardan's to the Arabic collection of fables preserved in codex 1049 (now 3515) of the India House Library in London, and shows that the latter is translated from the former, and not vice versa, as Du MeriP and, following him, Mr. Joseph Jacobs- have supposed.

The Armenians so constantly translated from Arabic in the Middle Ages, and there are so few examples even of a Christian Arab using Armenian sources, that the mistake was a natural one. Professor Marr translates some thiry-five of the Arabic fables, and shows how their translator has often mistaken the sense of the Armenian and imported Armenian words into his text. Let us follow him in comparing the rival texts of a single fable. No. 173, which in the Armenian stands as follows :

" The king and the dog and the shadow.

"A king, good and kindly, made a feast on the bank of the river. And a dog that was hungry came to the king, and he gave (it) a clean loaf (///. bread). And the dog took (it) and went along the bank of the river, saw in the water his own shadow, as it were another dog and the bread in his mouth. And the dog being greedy forgot the bread, which was in his mouth, leapt into the river, in order to take the bread from the other dog, but he found (it) not {i.e., he did not succeed), because it was the shadow. And that bread which he had the river bore away. And the dog went away and came to a death by hunger.

' Poisics inedites du Moyeit Age, Paris, 1 854.
 * 1716 Fables of ALsop, 1889, vol. i. p. 177.