Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/148

 136 Reviews.

their interpretation and tiie study of their origin, and at the same time endeavoured to give all the parallels available in other literatures. Dr. Pascu has been satisfied with a more modest programme. He has limited himself to a detailed study of the origin. He has introduced system and method into the classification of the riddles according to their metaphorical and paraphrastic sense. He has endeavoured to fix those which seem to belong to the whole of the Roumanian people, and to determine more closely the character of those of a local origin. He has grouped together all the subjects of riddles according to the classes into which he has divided them. He devotes, further- more, a chapter to the criticism of the collectors who have pre- ceded him, such as Anton Pann and Ispirescu. Then, in another chapter, he discusses the rise, change, and disappearance of riddles with the subjects which have .also disappeared owing to modern changes, social and political. Dr. Pascu recognizes the ethnographical value of the close examination of riddles, and he shows the connection of riddles with children's games, proverbs, and incidents in fairy tales. He perceives clearly the literary origin of a good number of proverbs, and he quotes a number from the texts published by me in my History of Roumatiia?t Popular Literature, and in my Roumanian Chrestofnathie ; such are " Questions and Answers," which is the Roumanian parallel of the western " Lucidarius," and "Arkir and Anadam," the Roumanian form of the famous " History of Arkirios," ^ " The life of Bertoldo," the Roumanian parallel of the western " Solomon and Marcolphus," the history of Aesop attributed to Planudes, and one or two more collections published by me in abstracts. Dr. Pascu has, however, not recognized sufficiently the great importance of these literary sources, for not only are those few the oldest that can be traced in Roumanian or in any other literature, but they must also have served as models for those created by popular art and ingenuity, and must have given the first impulse to such plays of the mind. He also has been a little hard on his predecessors, whom he charges with having altered the form of some of these riddles. He forgets that they belonged to a period

^ See my publication of this Roumanian version in The journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, April, 1900, pp. 301-19.