Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/422

 REVIEWS.

The Myth of the Pent Cuckoo. By John Edward Field,

M.A. Pp. vii + 212. London: Elliot Stock. 1913. The Vicar of Benson declares his book to be an " enquiry into the meaning and value of the widespread story of the jnen who pent, or hedged in, the cuckoo/'" and he purports in the second place " to give an account of a series of sites bearing the traditional name of Cuckoo Pens along the southern slopes of the Chiltern Hills," (p. v). The latter subject is treated at the greater length, and with some originality ; but as a study in folklore the book will hardly be accepted. The author's professed intention of establish- ing a connection between the Men of Gotham stories and these fifteen sites on the Chilterns is rather obscured by the mass of archgeological, historical, and etymological matter he has introduced — in itself quite acceptable and interesting. The argument runs something like this. All, or nearly all, of the " Cuckoo Pens," (as a rule isolated clumps of trees), are associated with ancient earth- works. Racial enmities are often the foundation of beliefs and legends calculated to bring ridicule on a particular people. When one finds, as at Swyncombe Down, that the popular belief is that within the Cuckoo Pen "the Philistines one day pent up the cuckoo" (p. 96), Mr. Field would have the cuckoo to be "the beleaguered Briton" (p. 97). He sees here and elsewhere a sur- vival of the bitter century of Anglo-British contests. Why cuckoo ? Pressed by this difficulty, the author traces a corruption from Cuck Pen, the verb to cuck being used contemptuously for the utterance of unintelligible sounds. "To the ears of the English a Briton would merely 'cuck' when he spoke, and his race would be called the cuck-folk " (p. 204).