Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/426

 4o6 Reviews.

we can watch it gradually extending and developing as it does in our own time. For further facts in confirmation and extension of his views, Professor Rhys Davids may be referred to the results of the Ethnographical Survey of Bengal and the North-Western Provinces, with which he seems to be unacquainted.

On the whole, this volume may be safely recommended to all students of the early social and religious development of the Peninsula, while to the scientific anthropologist it presents many acts of the greatest interest. Needless to say the translation is admirably done, and considering the character of the original is very readable. The editor in his voluminous notes has called attention to and thrown considerable light upon the many obscure questions which are suggested by his text.

W. Crooke.

Grettis Saga Asmundarsonar. Ed. R. C. Boer. Pp. Hi. 348. 8vo. Halle, 1900. (Altnordische Saga-bibliothek, 8.)

A HANDY edition for beginners, especially German beginners, for whom the notes, which are sometimes needless and often too long, are obviously intended. The text is too much cut up by the extraneous matter and over-divided by numerals. But the editor, already favourably known by his edition of Beorn of Hitdale's Saga, &c., has conscientiously faced the difficulties he met, and has been able to correct the vulgate in several places, especially in the verses. He knows his Kalund well. As a store of folklore ; as an instance of old tradition gathering about an historic personage owing to the conscious and unconscious efforts of those who successively related, orally or by pen, his life, till two centuries after his murder some literary Icelander of the Sturlung school composed the story as we have it ; as a fine literary com- position in its own way, the Saga is important, as important as Egla or Laxdsela.

The accretions that have gathered round the central historic points can most of them be traced. Dr. Vigfusson, in the Corpus Poeticum Boreak, showed that in the Gld7n incident and the Ogress incident we have echoes of the O. E. Beowulf's Lay. It was known that one of the Spes incidents was taken from the

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