Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/507

 Reviews. 475

Le Folk-Lore de France. Par Paul S^billot. Tome Premier: Le Ciel et la Terre. 8vo, pp. vi., 491. Paris : E. Guilmoto. 1904.

M. Paul Sebillot, the indefatigable secretary of the Societe des Traditions Fopulaires, has made for himself a new claim on the gratitude of students by the comprehensive work on the folklore of France, of which this is the first volume. The object of the work is to form a cyclopaedia (M. Sebillot modestly calls it an inventory) of the folklore of France and French-speaking countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. In an interesting pre- face he gives an account of the steps by which he was led to the compilation of so important a collection, and of the problem that confronted him in dealing with his materials. Apparently the easiest way, and in some respects the most satisfactory, would have been to transcribe the texts or, where these were very diffuse, to give summaries from all his authorities, numbering each of the extracts consecutively. He tried this plan at first, but found it inconvenient. It led to tiresome repetition, or to still more tire- some references to and fro. It was difficult to make use of traditional elements which had found their way into literature and there taken literary, rather than traditional, form. Where the tradi- tional elements consisted of tales, there were often superstitions and customs in intimate relation with them. The stories and the superstitions or the customs helped to explain one another ; and yet by what may be called the textual method there was no oppor- tunity of showing their relations. M. Sebillot, therefore, abandoned it for the more delicate and laborious task of writing what virtually constitutes a series of monographs arranged in a systematic order. In this way he has been able to develop each subject more exactly, to weave his citations more closely together, to give them sometimes nearly complete, at other times to reduce them to their really useful and trustworthy elements, and thus to forge, as it were, one after another, the links of a chain of traditions.

The first volume is divided into four books, treating respectively of the Heavens, Night and the Spirits of the Air, the Earth, and the Underworld. These books or primary divisions are subdivided into chapters, in each of which a single department of the subject is treated. The method is to give first the stories, then the beliefs,