Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/424

 392 Reviews.

in spite of the publication of the weighty tomes of the English Dialect Dictionary. But on subjects which concern their daily life and occupy their minds the folk have no lack of words. The opera- tions of husbandry have an elaborate vocabulary of their own. Grass cut for hay lies successively in a swath, a windrozv, a coil, and a cock, before it is removed to the rick or stack. Corn, before reaping-machines were introduced, might be cut either with a sickle or a badging-hook (or equivalent names), and the methods of using the tool were each distinguished by special names also. The horses in a team are the fore-horse and the thill-horse, or the leader, \\\q. pitiner, and the shafter. Different receptacles for carry- ing goods or tools, in one and the same area, are a bag (sack), a budget, a wisket, and a carriage, respectively. Synonyms occur. A boggy place, in Cheshire, is called a gouty place, explained as a tvobby place, and that as a mizzick, and that again as a murgin (p. 24). The multitude of the superstitious fears that beset the folk is reflected in the wealth of words to express them. One may be ill-wished, overlooked, overshadowed, or blifiked, may be witched, or laid under a spell; be will-led, ox pixy-led ; he /I eyed, gallied, ifiter- riipted, or terrified, by boggarts, bogies, barghests, pharisees, or 7vish-hounds, according to the locality of one's abode (chap. xii.).

This matter of locality is one in which dialect may -be of special service to the folklorist. The boundaries of local dialects are sometimes very sharp and precise. On the watershed between the Wear and the Tees, all the streams running northwards to the Wear are Saxon burns, while those which run southwards to the Tees are Scandinavian becks (p. 7). A coincidence between the boundaries of dialect and custom, where it occurs, forms valuable ethnographical evidence ; where such boundaries do not coincide, the variations of custom may be suspected to have had other than a racial origin.

Mrs. Wright tells her tale in an artless and simple style which very much becomes it. Her authorities are, of course, chiefly those of the English Dialect Dictionary, and she enlivens her work with many apposite examples, often gathered from her personal experience. The book may be specially recommended to those students of social anthropology who do not yet appreciate the value of British evidence. C. S. Burne.