Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/427

 Reviews, 401

The Man in the Panther's Skin. A Romantic Epic by Shot'ha Rust'havkli. a close Rendering from the Geor- gian, attempted by Marjorv Scott Wardroi'. (Oriental Translation Fund, N.S., vol. xxi.) The Royal Asiatic Society, 1912. Svo, pp. xviii + 273. los.

The literature of the Georgians differs from that of other oriental Christian peoples, for example, of the Armenians who were their nearest neighbours geographically and ecclesiastically, of the Syrians, Copts, and Abyssinians, in this, that over and above their Church literature they have preserved from the Middle Ages a literature of epic and romance. No doubt the Armenians also at one time possessed such a literature, but we already at the very beginning of the thirteenth century read of the attempts made by Armenian doctors like Mekhitar Gosh to suppress it. These efforts were successful, and nothing of it remains, much to the regret of moderns, who would have preferred a few hundred pages of pagan Armenia to all the dreary monastic stuff which has been preserved.

The Mati in the Panther's Skin is a romantic epic, written or redacted in the form in which we read it to-day, at least as early as the year 1200, so belonging exactly to the period when the Armenian doctors began to interest themselves in the destruction of their national sagas. It is of some length, and contains 1576 stanzas of four lines each. Here is a specimen of how such a stanza reads in the original language:

Mze ushenod ver ikmnchis | radgan slienkhar misi tsi'Ii

Gaghanamtza mas iaklile | misi eili art'hu tsbili

Miina gnakho mandve gsakho | ganminai'hio giili chrdili

t'hu sitzotzkhle mtsare mkonda | sicvdilimtza mkondes tcbfli.

We are reminded of Burns' beautiful stanza:

Had we never loved so kindly, Had we never loved so blindly, Never met, or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

— which Duncan Forbes selected (in his Persian grammar of 1862) to illustrate the rhyme of old Persian poetry. It is nearly the