Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/302

 2 74 Revieivs.

night on Saturday, or shepherds who stole or betrayed their trust ; one-eyed chamois, dragons, three-legged horses, foxes with red and brown boots, headless or two-headed monsters, and many more forms of evil figure in the tales.

There are a goodly number of dwarf stories, many of them be- longing to familiar types, e.g. payment in coal which turns to gold, the dwarf who quits work when presented with clothes, or " Myself did it." In some cases dwarfs eat children, and they are described as swarthy and possessed of feet which are turned backwards.

I will conclude the notice of this treasure house of the traditions of a district with a small point which struck me in reading through the contents. Dwarfs are frequent. I noticed but one reference to giants (p. 92), a version of The Boy who did not -kno2v what Fear was ; and these giants are but the black souls of dead men under a spell. In the area with which I am the most familiar, the Near East, the spooks are all gigantic, dwarfs do not appear. In Northern Europe dwarfs, elves, etc. and giants flourish side by side. It suggests that the theme of Giants and Dwarfs, once treated by Ritson, might be approached from a new point of view, the distribution of their respective popularity charted, and so far as practicable accounted for. There will be, I suspect, both historical and literary influences to consider, but one wonders after reading these Alpine traditions whether physical charac- teristics and physical environment may not turn out an important factor in guiding indirectly the popular imagination one way or the other.

It would be difficult, too, I fancy, to bring the dwarf from India !

W. R. Halliday.

Der Held im Deutschen und Russischen Marchen. By August von Lowis of Menar. Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 191 2. 8vo, pp. 139. 3 m.

The aim of the book is to examine in detail the nature and characteristics of the hero in German and Russian folk-tales. The German and Russian heroes are analysed in turn ; the points of resemblance and difi"erence are then summed up in a chapter of