Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/305

 Revieivs. 277

larity of stories. For instance, The Faithless Mother, alluded to on p. 114, is very common not nierely in Slav countries but all through the Near Eastern group. It is not popular in Western Europe. Many stories whose general type is common to the two groups are very different in their species. Our author alludes to Marienkind (p. io6), of which the Near Eastern type, to which some at least of the Russian versions evidently conform, is very different to the German.

Further, we wish to hear more of the differences in supernatural machinery and in the conventional detail. The tutor, who takes the place of The Faithful Servant in Russian stories, is of course the Lata of Turkish folk-tale. The magic horse is another inter- esting feature. He is amazingly popular in Russia, and in varying degree among other members of the Near Eastern group. We should like to have worked out in greater detail the more prosaic treatment which these and similar creatures of a wonder world receive at the hands of German peasants. In German Miirchen the magic horse is only an enchanted man (vide p. 67).

W. R. Halliday.

Piedmont. By Estella Canziani and Eleanour Rohoe. With 50 repro. of i)ictures and n)any line drawings by Estella Canziani. Chatto & Windus, 1913. 4to, pp. viii-l-204. 2 IS. n.

In these pages the folk beliefs and customs of Piedmont rear themselves like wild flowers amidst their natural surroundings, and not like specimens pulled up and classiiied in a herbarium, afier Ihe dtyifig which is sometimes a preliminary to their scientific arrangement. Their home background is literally painted in for us with faithful and glowing detail that could only be noted by a woman and set down by an accomplished artist. In tiie pictures brilliantly reproduced we see in vivid colours not only the moun- tain clouds and mist and clifts, and the lovely childhood and wonderfully withered old age of the mountaineers, but the rude frescoes of saints on the pillars, "the arch where the mules go home to the stable," the beautiful fele costumes, the hair orna-