Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/144

 1 3- Reviews.

antiquity, while their contents include references to such up-to-date things as telegraphs, Board schools or their Greek equivalent, the public and private virtues of M. Venezelos, and the straight shooting of certain Greek troops. Certainly folklore is not killed by modern progress in Greece at any rate.

In conclusion we must note that Laographia is one of the few sources from which really reliable information about modern Greek customs can be obtained. The English and German books on this subject are often inaccurate, and a number of corrections of them are made in passing, particularly by Prof. Polites.

H. J. Rose.

Drachen und Drachenkampfer. Von Geza Roheim. (An off-print, with enlargements, from /uiig-U?tgarn, 1911.) Berlin, 191 2. 4to, pp. 56.

Ta Brjfxtodr] KXXyjviKa aa-jxa-a —epl t/}s opa/coiTOKToi't'as rov '^Ayiov

Tewpytov. [Greek Popular Songs on St. George and THE Dragon.] Reprinted from Laographia, vol. iv. By N. G. Polites. Athens, 19 13.

These two works handle from different points of view a portion of the vast collection of known tales of dragon-fighting heroes. M. Roheim's little work, confessedly not nearly a complete treatise on so gigantic a subject, endeavours to steer clear of the hasty assumptions and unjustified generalizations which have marred the labours of many of his predecessors. He combats especially the tendency to reject without sufficient investigation the astral explanation of the myth. We think that he goes too far in the other direction ; but we most heartily agree with his protest against the tendency to refer to one source all myths, or for that matter all customs, which happen to have a family resemblance to one another. There is, as he well reminds us, such a thing as con- vergence in folklore as in biology (p. 55), and, as in the latter case whales have modified their structure until they closely resemble fishes, so in the former we may have myths from totally different sources following a similar line of development and coming to appear almost identical.