Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/545

 Reviews, 487

Skeat expedition as a volunteer in its tour through the Eastern Siamese Malay States in igoi-2, an expedition to which his university and the Royal Society of London gave financial assist- ance. He has also made contributions to the publications of the Anthropological Institute, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is now Deputy Superintendent of the Indian Museum at Calcutta. In the work before us, which is appropriately dedicated to Professor E. B. Tylor, he gives the result of a series of summer and autumn holidays spent between the years 1896 and 1903, in the Faroes and Iceland. The people of the Faroes are described as a finely-built and handsome race, and we believe that, like many others in remote islands, they retain a brachycephalic type harking back to the Stone Age, but Mr. Annandale does not furnish any measurement of the cephalic index. This book is a charming little work of viii4-2 38 pages, commendably free from purely technical details, and illustrated by 24 good photographs. The cover is adorned with a neat sketch-map. We proceed to note some of its contributions to folk-lore.

The superstitions of the people of the Faroes deal mostly with trolls, mermaids, and water-spirits. The trolls are the little people who live inside the fairy mount, from which they issue at night or in solitary places, to dance, or to play mis- chievous tricks on human beings, or sometimes to steal a child. Trolls' Head is the name given to a rock where a troll lost his head in the attempt to tie two islands together (p. 22). A disease to which cattle are liable is ascribed to trolls, and called " troll-riding " (p. 23). It is firmly believed that they still kidnap little girls (p. 24). Mermaids entangle fishermen's lines and snap off their hooks. The soldiers of Pharaoh who were lost in the Red Sea were not drowned but turned into seals, which swam away to the north. They are said to climb a hill on Naalsoe once a month, throwing off their skins and dancing in human form, and men have gained wives of great beauty by surprising them and withholding their discarded s):ins (p. 26). Unfortunately the indigenous seals which were once abundant in the Faroes have now been quite exterminated, though a few come south from Iceland in the winter.