Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/214

204 Collectanea. Here we have more or less an exact parallel of the story of Gulliver among the Lilliputians, mixed up with the famous story of the battle between the dwarfs and the storks known already from the time of Herodot. It formed then part of the well-known romance of Alexander the Great, but nowhere except here is there any mention of a big man coming among these little people. It is, at any rate, a curious fact that a story of this kind should be known in Constantinople and as far back as the middle of the twelfth century.

I am not aware that any one has endeavoured to trace the direct source for Swift's tale of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. It may have been a sailor's yarn brought to the West from the East, for we find it as a well-known tale in Constantinople, that is, in the Levant, in the twelfth century. The version recorded by Hadasi leads now almost directly to Swift's Gulliver and the Lilliputians. I must leave it to others to trace the immediate stages of transmission from Byzance to the West. Was it brought by the Crusaders, by word of mouth as a sailor's yarn, or was it carried in a written form from East to West? In any case, it is a very curious parallel which seems to have been hitherto unknown.

II. The Story of the Dog-headed Men.

I might now mention also here the story of the Dog-men (Kytiokephaloi) recorded by the same author, for it belongs to the same cycle of the Romance of Alexander as the previous story, and has undergone a similar change and localization as the former. From being a purely mythical tale, it becomes now almost a concrete fact. This story is told by the person himself who experienced these adventures, and yet it is not at all improbable that this story of an "eye-witness" is a story of fanciful imagination. The belief in dog-men was so strong that the Eastern Church counts among its saints one of these dog-men, Christopher; and I possess in my library an old Rumanian chap-book, the "Life" of St. Christopher, where he is depicted with a dog's head. This booklet was printed in the monastery of Neamitz by a monk under the blessing of the then Metropolitan of Moldavia. In the