Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/513

 Reviews. 471

tional ones were printed in Moscow in 1849. We read of Mkhi- thar Gosh's literary work in Kirakos, an Armenian historian of the thirteenth century, who attests that he left "moral pages," and interested himself in " the deep allegories " of Scripture. The Venice MS., No. 1091, of the seventeenth century; the Vienna MS., No. 29, of the year 1746, and another of Edjmiatzin, No. 2, A.D. 1777, ascribe these fables to him. But various Edjmiatzin codices, e.g. No. 2238, attribute them to one John Tsortsoretzi by name. The colophon of this MS. demonstrates that to whichever of these writers this collection of fables is due, it was made not later than 13 16 a.d.

Some thirty fables of the collection, made in the year 1316, already stood in Wardan's collection, and in sections 64-83 Pro- fessor Marr contrasts the forms which this common matter assumes in the rival collections, and shows that the one collector did not merely borrow from the other ; indeed, they were all three too nearly contemporary for this to have been the case. They took from common sources.

The popularity of Wardan's collection was such that it not only passed, as we have seen, into Arabic, but into Georgian as well, as Professor Marr points out on p. 574 of his second volume. The Georgian version lacks the last six of the fables, and is com- posed in the popular dialect.

In pp. 577-582 of his first volume Professor Marr sums up the results of his lengthy enquiry. He reviews in brief the history of the fable among Armenians, and from his paragraphs the fol- lowing sentences are translated : —

" The appearance of the fable in Armenian literature is closely connected with the influence thereon of Greek culture, and in this sense the Armenians can quite apply to themselves the observation of the French fable-writer —

L'invention des arts etant un droit d'atnesse, Nous devons Tapologue ^ I'ancienne Grece.

"As nearly as may be in the seventh century the collection of fables of Olympianus appeared among the Armenians in a trans- lation made from the Greek. It consisted of fables of /ICsop in a rhetorical dress. This was their first acquaintance with such literature, and it was followed in time by Armenian translations of other fables, either ylCsop's own or the same in a simpler re-