Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/295

Rh cunning adored by the native. In the twelfth and seventeenth stories, however, Eyevi is the name of a human trickster,—an example probably of anthropomorphizing tendency, as the person tricked is, in the former story, a dove. No. 16 is an inconsequent story in which the fiercer animals appear as slave-dealers, and in the next story a king's daughter is stolen as a slave. The few comparative notes given are chiefly from German Kamerun and East African collections, and could have been extended very usefully.

The proverbs and riddles are an unusually interesting gathering of negro wit and wisdom; the riddles are especially welcome, as such devisings are commonly dismissed with much less notice than they merit as products of the black man's mind. The trinknamen (ahanoṅkowo) are names, or rather sentences (and generally well-known proverbs), which, to the number of 5, 10, or 20, are attached to a palm-wine drinker. He cries out these "names," or has them cried at him by a friend, as an encouragement in times of difficulty or war. They may refer to his weak side as well as to his more heroic qualities of body and mind, and personal names may be chosen from them. Several Togo variations of the wide-spread game of mandala are described, with figures, and other games resemble European games with tops, ninepins, etc. Unlike the lower Congo natives, the Togos prefer "sit-down" games to those requiring much bodily exertion. The songs are said by the natives to have been borrowed from the Tshi, and a curious tale ascribes the origin of drum-beating and singing to the natives of a Fanti seaside town who learnt them from the sea. Forty pages are devoted to a painstaking account of Togo music and songs.

District-Commissioner Dayrell's volume of forty stories has the advantage of a ten-page introduction by Mr. Lang (who indicates in his usual delightful fashion the surprisingly numerous variants in ancient myth and European märchen), but the tales themselves are on the whole less varied and interesting than the Togoland collection. About half of them refer to Calabar or its immediate neighbourhood, or are dated by Calabar kings, and many of these contain references to the Egbo society. The number of these stories of which variants have already been recorded from elsewhere