Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/110

 102 chopped straw, his cloud-chariot, his death and burial, etc. On these and other similarities of detail it is remarked that "they are something more than the simple parallels with which the comparative mythology of the Aryan peoples deals, and it is especially the great number of these details concentrated on a single theme which can but weaken our faith in the authenticity of the one book or the other, or of both. There exists, indeed, a special relationship between the Slaves and Lithuanians; it is reflected in their languages and also in their myths. But it is the degree of this relationship which here plays the principal part. We willingly admit the existence of features common to the stories of Slaves and Lithuanians, as, for example, in that of the three brothers of whom one is stupid, in that of the man without fear, of Cinderella, etc.; but a legend of a character entirely national supposes a colouring quite different and distinctive—in fact, a national colouring. If we had been told similar tales concerning the kings of the Lithuanians and of the Letts resembling one another as strongly as the Lusatian and Samogitian legends with which Dr. Veckenstedt regales us, we should have expressed doubts; much more, then, when we are asked to believe that the political legends of two peoples, as far apart ethnographically and geographically as the Lithuanians and Lusatians, have a mass of identical details gathered round the single figure of a king. No, it is impossible. Even an elementary knowledge of the things, the places, the men, and the circumstances is enough to enable us to understand that we have here nothing but a mystification, an invention, an imposture." M. Carlowicz, in pressing home this accusation, does not fail to insist upon Dr. Veckenstedt's admission, already seized upon by M. Gaidoz, that he had put these legends into literary shape. While pointing out a number of resemblances, which he contends cannot be fortuitous, to Lasicki's account of the Zhamaite gods, he regrets that the Doctor should have neglected the works of Afanasieff on the Slave