Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/515

 Reviews. 473

Wardan's. For the rest, neither the collections which were thus formed in imitation of Wardan, nor Wardan's own, had any distinct physiognomy of their own. . ..

" Wardan found many anonymous imitators in this field, and the success which his fables had was part of the general enthu- siasm shown for such literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The schools also helped to increase their vogue and development. In scholastic circles ever new forms of them began to arise, made up out of former collections, and not in- frequently adapted to the purposes of edification." . ..

Meanwhile, according to Professor Marr, the true yEsop's fable disappeared. He writes : —

" The fables of /Esop in all probability were displaced in schools by the allegories of Wardan. ^sop disappeared in Armenian literature. His fables have not reached us in an inde- pendent form. They were all swallowed up in Wardan's." . ..

"Towards the beginning of the fourteenth century another masterpiece of Armenian allegory was already in existence, namely the original collection of fables attributed, though doubtfully, to Mkhitar Gosh, who died in 12 13, In this collection, fables already comprised in that of Wardan were used up afresh, as ready-made material

"Once the Wardan collections were extended to include alien matter on so broad a scale, no limits could be set to its infusion. Fables and anecdotes began to intrude themselves, not only out of books but from popular sources."

It is undoubtedly this element of popular folklore which is most valuable in the 340 pages of Armenian texts edited by Professor Marr. The end which the good doctors Wardan and Mkhithar, no less than the earlier translators of yEsop and of the Bestiary, had had in view was to give Armenians a collection of tales which would help them to forget their own old mythology, their tales of Vahagn and Anahite, and of other old divinities hateful to the mind of the Christian missionaries. Thus Kirakos of Gantsak in Media, an Armenian writer of the thirteenth century, relates that Nerses the Graceful (Catholicos, 1166 a.d.) "composed allegories from books (? the Bible) and parables to be repeated at feasts and weddings instead of myths." It would be some consolation to the modern folklorist to learn that the native myth, which doctors and patriarchs thus expelled with their theological pitchforks, had