Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/117

Rh as to the narrators which ought to have been affixed to every tale.

The Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-tales, published by Mr. Grinnell, are very valuable, as giving us an authentic glimpse of the traditions and mode of life (for the author has added a number of interesting anthropological notes) of a North-American tribe, of which only too little is known. In my report last year I drew attention to the importance of the historical, as well as the mythical, traditions of the Maoris. One section of Mr. Grinnell's book is devoted to corresponding Pawnee traditions, called by him "Hero Stories". The mythical traditions deal chiefly with the relations conceived to exist between men and the lower animals. Two of them narrate the origin of the bear and deer dances. Others are legends of persons who have died and been restored to life. None can safely be overlooked by students of savage thought.

M. Dumontier has included a dozen stories in his Annamite collection, which is of much inferior interest to those of Landes and Des Michels, and, indeed, if tales only be considered, to his own previous Légendes Historiques de l'Annan et du Tonkin. The tradition of the first man is curious, the human race, according to it, being derived from a man who was hatched from a square egg dropped by a bird, one of a pair produced from a tree. Three of the stories are comic; one turning on the effect of a mirror on persons who had never seen such a thing before, another an analogue of the barber's blind brother in the Arabian Nights, and the third a well-known variant of "The Three Wishes". We have also a Travelling Deity story, a story of a brother and sister who married without being aware of their kinship, and two stories turning on the superstition that he who succeeded in placing his father's bones inside the mouth of a subaqueous dragon would become a king. The remainder are beast tales, one of which—"The Opium-smoker and the Tiger"—is obviously of quite modern origin.