Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/145

 Reviews. 133

He distinguishes several types of dragon, using the word in the wide sense of any bestial enemies of heroes of popular legend. We have in the first place water-demons (p. 6); naturally enough, as dragons are mostly of reptilian shape, and snakes live for the most i)art in or near water. Hence we get dragons of mountain torrents, and hence of mountains in general. (We should say that the presence of serpents on rocky hills was alone enough to account for this; indeed Roheim owns as much.) Hence dragons of volcanoes (p. 9); dragons of trees and woods (ibid.). All these arise more or less directly out of actual snakes, and hence the frequent 7notif of the bird which fights or helps to fight the dragon. This bird develops into a totemic ancestor of bird-form, and hence into an anthropomorphic hero. We object here to this free and easy use of the word " totemism," which is still unfor- tunately prevalent on the Continent, and also to the assumption that the theriomorphic hero belongs to one stratum and the antliro- pomorphic to another.

Less directly connected with natural history are the dragons of sickness, a particular species of the theriomorphic demons of disease (p. 13); the dragon who develops out of the belief that the dead appear in snake-form and hence is a guardian of buried treasure and later the warden of Hades (pp. \% et seq.). The combination of soul-serpent and soul-bird gives us the flying dragon (p. 23). (We doubt this.) Finally we have the huge variety of celestial dragons, developed out of such things as the dark half of the moon which devours the light half, the monster which causes eclipses or sunset by devouring the luminary; the cloud- or rain-dragon, who has affinities with the river-dragon, and so on. The heroes who figlit these miscellaneous monsters are of equally varied character, such as the sorcerer who destroys the dragon of sickness (p. 24); the Sun which conquers the storm- dragon (p. 35), — this we can be sure of from the numerous cases in which " nicht der Erklarer, sondern die Afythe selbst von Sonne und Mond es erzdhlf," and so forth.

All this is amply illustrated with a series of references to the literature of folklore, and we agree with the general conclusions. We would, however, take a further step in the analysis, and insist that the general trend of the legends of the particular people