Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/143

 Reviews. 125

made the wild beasts come to him. Piiran Bhagat is the Indian equivalent of Joseph, and is a most popular character in Indian tales : an episode so widely diffused cannot be easily traced to its source, but here too we have the Greek parallel of Hippolytus. A shooting episode in Rasalu (p. 213) reminds one of Odysseus and the Axes. The princess set adrift in a chest, the parallel of Danae, is also found in the person of Dilaram in the remarkable tale of Nek Bakht. The two parrots guarding their faithless mistress, the fate of one and shrewdness of the other, the tale of Rasalu (p. 283) are found in the west, the best known version being in the Gesta Roi?ianorum. Human sacrifice at founding a building, an unjust judge convicted by reductio ad absiirduni, the feeding of ghosts of the dead, are a few amongst many of the interesting episodes of the book. As a story, we think that of Gill Badshah bears the palm ; its fantastic setting makes it one of the best of fairy tales. The book, in spite of the faults I have indicated, will be necessary to students of folk-tales.

W. H. I). Rouse.

CoNTES PopuLAiRES d'Afrique, PAR Rene Basset. Paris.

E. GUILMOTO. 1903.

An anthology of folk-tales gathered from the whole African con- tinent seems, at first sight, an undertaking so vast that any attempt to produce one in a moderate compass would be little likely to be attended with satisfactory results. However, we are agreeably dis- appointed in M. Basset's collection, which, at any rate brings out the common elements underlying the folklore of a continent so far from homogeneous, ethnologically and philologically. The tales are divided into nine sections, following the linguistic classification of F. Miiller and Lepsius, except in the case of the " Negro " and " Nuba-Fula "groups, which have been re-arranged, geographically, as " Nile," " Soudan," and " Senegambia and Guinea." There are thus seven divisions, instead of Miiller's six ; and in addition to these we have an eighth, consisting of tales from Madagascar (which does not, strictly speaking, belong to Africa), and a ninth, headed " Contes des Negres des Colonies," giving specimens from Mauritius, Louisiana, the Antilles and Brazil.