Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/127

 Reviews. in

The Edda : II. The Heroic Mythology of the North. By Wini fred Faraday, M A. (^Popular Studies in Mythology, Romatice, and Folklore. No. 13.) D. Nutt. 6d. net.

This brochure completes Miss Faraday's study of the poems of the Edda begun in No. 1 2 of the series ; and the two numbers can be heartily commended both to the casual reader who wishes to gain a general knowledge of the subject and to students wanting a handy guide to it. Beside the lays collected by the compiler of the Edda, Miss Faraday adds to the usefulness of her work by including a review of some other Scandinavian poems and legends, such as the Angantyr lays and the story of the Everlasting Fight, which escaped his net. The various lays are clearly and concisely analysed by Miss Faraday and the discrepancies between them pointed out, while her remarks on the problem of their origin and of the relationship of the various versions, Anglo-Saxon, German, Scandinavian, of which we have record, sufficiently indicate the main points and difficulties of the question. Miss Faraday's own views on the subject are indicated without bias. The biblio- graphical references on this head might with advantage have in- cluded Professor's Bugge's The Home of the Eddie Foe?ns (Grimm Library). The note on page 55, acknowledging Miinch's ingenuity in identifying with Odin the old man who received Sinfjotti's corpse into his boat, is surely a superfluous tribute, as the identity must be obvious to every one who has made any study of the subject. It may be well to warn the general reader that lovers of the old Norse mythology will not entirely agree with Miss Faraday's literary estimate, expressed in another note on the same page, of ^Vagner's handling of the old legends in his Ring des Nibelungen. In his endeavour to weld the Divine and the Heroic myths into an organic whole, Wagner has in many points degraded the former without any compensating gain to the latter. — A. F. Major.

Folktales fro7n the Indus Valley. Edited by W. Crooke. Reprinted from the Indian Antiquary. Bombay. 1902.

These eighteen stories are edited and retold by Mr. W. Crooke, from the collections of Mr. T. L. Barlow and Major F. McNair, who gathered them in the village of Ghazi, near Atak.

Most of them are slightly didactic, even where (as in No. vii.) the moral is obviously dragged in to excuse the shrewd Northern