Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/513

 Correspondence. 489

obstacle is the desire to substitute fictitious heritages from antiquity learned in the schools for the despised facts.

Further, the folk-tale itself looks suspiciously as if the classical parts had been added by design. The main incidents belong quite obviously to a favourite story in Greece ^ and the Nearer East,^ which I am tempted to believe is its original home. The only versions known to me of Western European tales connected with it are very broken down and altered, as if they had reached the limit of their diffusion. You have then a perfectly familiar type of folk-tale which has nothing to do with antiquity. In this sole example, alleged to have been collected at Eleusis, from an Albanian priest, S. Demetra is inserted rather to the detriment of the plot of the story. Further, we know that both informants and collectors are more than eager to establish connections with classical antiquity. It seems to me difficult for the impartial not to be sceptical.

There is one other folk-tale which perhaps deserves mention, viz., Hahn, No. 76, Dionysos. The collector, though not von Hahn himself, is unimpeachable. On the other hand, the story was collected in Boiotia, another Albanian district, and has, so far as I know, no kind of parallel from other collections of Greek folk- tales ; and it should be remembered that, thanks to the patriotic labours of Greeks and the zeal of philologists, the harvest of modern Greek folk-tales published in the vernacular is very large indeed. I feel about this story that, if it were an archaeological object, I should reject it as ungenuine, and should be surprised if an accredited collector bought it. But I do not know that my

suspicions are susceptible of proof.

W. R. Hallidav.

^J. G. von Hahn, Grieckisckeuiid Albanesiscke Md)rhen,'iio. 52 (N. Euboia) ; IlapvaaffoSy X., p. 517 (Thera) ; Legrand, Contes Poptdaires Grecs, p. 145.

"Turkish in Kunoz, oJ>. cit., pp. 114, 128 [translated Bain, Turkish Fairy and Folk- Tales, p. 114]; Magyar in Jones and Kropf, The Folk- Tales of the Magyars, p. 39; Albanian in Dozon, Contes Albanaises, No. 15 ; Georgian in Wardrop, op. cit., p. 113 ; Serbian in Mijetovitch, Serbian Folk-Lore, p. 139 ; Russian in 'RzXsion, Russian Folk-Tales,^. 85 ; 'HvAga.x'iz.ngy^sy in Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. iii., p. 184; Moravian gypsy, F. H. Groome, Gypsy Folk-Tales, No. 43.

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