Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/568

 504 Reviews.

Pokorny, of Vienna. The subject which he has chosen to study is a highly difficult one, the origin of the Arthur saga. The question has been so often discussed that no student would choose it unless he felt that he had a thorough acquaintance with the material and that he had something new to say. Dr. Pokorny has both, and I have seldom sat down to read a dissertation, on an old theme, which has interested me more. He treats the legends of Finn and Mongan as only local variants, so to say, of a legend found also in Wales ; they go back to a common origin. We cannot, however, follow him step by step through the argument developed in his paper ; suffice it to say that it leads up to the conclusion that what we have in the Arthur saga is an exceedingly ancient version of the Cuckoo myth. We shall be curious to see what the workers in the same department will say. At first, we fancy, they will smile and put it aside; but they will probably come back to it, and confess that there may be something in it. They will at all events find that Dr. Pokorny's hypothesis explains a variety of things never before accounted for in the legends and myths of the Celts of the British Isles.

John Rhys.

Tantrakhyayika, die alteste Fassung des Panchatantra, Aus DEM Sanskrit ubersetzt mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen Von Johannes Hertel. Erster Teil, Einleitung. Zweiter Teil, Ubersetzung und Anmerkungen. Leipzig und Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1909. Pp. viii+159, 158.

Fifty years have now elapsed since Benfey published his famous work on the Panchatantra, consisting, like Dr. Hertel's, of two volumes, — the first containing an introduction, and the second a translation. In the first volume he showed that the Panchatantra had infliienced the literature of the world more than any other work produced in India. It was translated into Pahlavl in the sixth century for the benefit of the famous Nushirawan, King of Persia ; and through the medium of various translations, the most important of which are those in Syriac and Arabic, it has passed into the literature of Western Asia, Africa, and Europe. It may