Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/424

 398 Reviews.

Le f'OLK-LORE : LlTT^RATURE ORALE ET EtHNOGRAPHIE

Traditionnei.le. Par Paul Sebillot. Paris : Octave Doin <S: Fils, 1913. Demy 8vo, pp. xxiv + 393. 5/

The indefatigable editor of the Revue des Traditions Populaires and author of Le Folk-lore de France has in this work produced a handbook and guide to the collector of folklore. His great experience in the collection of folklore in Upper Brittany and his wide anthropological learning render such a book specially authoritative. We open it with high expectations, nor are they disappointed. In an excellent introductory chapter he discusses the origin of the term Folklore, and defends its adoption, though a foreign word, as expressing more accurately than any other the extent and limitations of the subject. He divides its contents into two parts, which he calls respectively Oral Lit-erature and Tradi- tional Ethnography. Under the former head he ranks tales, ballads and songs, riddles, proverbs, and other sayings and formulae, infantine, social, magical, and so forth. The domain of Traditional Ethnography, on the other hand, is hard to trace with exactitude : its frontiers are so vague in the direction of ethnography properly so called and of anthropology other than physical. Any limitations, therefore, in these directions must be more or less arbitrary. In this country we have, long since disregarded them. He- enters a protest against the abuse of the term Folklore, a term of general import, by limiting it to folk-tales. English writers are, as he says, peculiarly guilty of this solecism. But it is not confined to them, as is proved by the examples he mentions of certain French authors. The chapter is concluded with some wise and useful observations on the collection and recording of folklore. Emphasis is laid on the necessity of alertness in collection and of meticulous accuracy in making the record, to the effacement, so far as possible, of the personal equation and the complete separation of commentary and inter- pretation from the report of the facts. .

In the body of the work Oral Literature occupies much less space than Traditional Ethnography. This is not because the distinguished author undervalues Oral Literature, of which in his native Brittany he has been so ardent and successful a collector.