Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/240

218 sun or moon for weeks, the persons buried during that period are looked on as neither very bad nor very good, and, therefore, to have gone, not to the sun or moon, but to the spirit town in the great forest.

Beetle belief.—In the island of Melos a small black beetle is much feared. It is about half an inch long, and its bite is said to be deadly, killing almost instantaneously. In the course of the excavations of the British School in the spring of 1911, two were met with, causing on each occasion great excitement. After pickaxes and shovels had done their worst, there remained, unfortunately, so little of the creature that it was impossible to examine a specimen.

"Forty" as place-name.—In many parts of Greece, (and I believe that the same is true of Turkey), the place-name "Saranda" (Forty) is to be met with. "Forty whats?" you ask, and are told,—"The name is just Forty." Now, in Greek and Turkish folk-tales (dhraki)—(not 'dragons,' by the way, but 'ogres'; I have noticed that some European folklorists have been misled by Hahn's translation Drache),—devs, and robbers live in gangs of forty, and the castle of the forty devs, robbers, or, is a very common feature of many of the tales. When travelling through the Cnidian peninsula with Mr. Dawkins in January, 1911, we came to a large, round tomb built of squared stones about two and a half hours' journey east of Knidos. On enquiry we learned that the place was called Saranda. It occurred to me that here was a possible explanation of the name. The tomb was the castle of the forty robbers or devs. The suspicion is partially confirmed by a reference I found subsequently in Traditions populaires de l'Asie Mineure, par E. Henry Carnoy et Jean Nicolaides, (Les Litératures Populaires de toutes les Nations, vol. xxviii., p. 357), where tradition definitely states that the "Caves of the Forty" near Judje Su in Cappadocia are so called for the reason which I suggest is the explanation of the frequent occurrence elsewhere of Saranda as a place name.