Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/261

 Review. 233

that beast stories are all exploded. Even if Brer Rabbit is reduced to mere literary elements, Bra 'Nanzi will remain, in the stories printed by Sir George Dasent and in the other set recorded by Mr. W. A. B. Musgrave for the Folk-Lore Record (iii. pt. i. 53-55), and in Mr. Walter Jekyll's Jamaican Song and Story (F.L.S., 1904). That is the sort of thing which a student of Renard is naturally led to consider, and he will consider it all the more closely the more he is inclined to diminish the share of folk-tales in the composition of the romance.

M. Foulet does not quite escape from the fallacy which seems to flourish best in medieval gardens ; the argument from non- extant to never-existent. He is much too clear and logical to indulge in the grosser forms of this error, but in pointing out the want of evidence for oral comic stories of beasts, he ought to have remembered that many rich antiquarian things are proved by single small pieces of evidence which have escaped the tooth of time through the merest hazard. Very near io Renard are \\\t fabliatix. By accident there remain two or three pieces of Latin verse preserv- ing fabliau plots from a time several generations earlier than the French fabliaux. A smaller fire than that of Alexandria or of Louvain might easily have destroyed the pleasant Latin version of the Swabian snow-child, or the Ambrosian quatrains De U?iibove, the ancestor of Big Clans and Little Clans. But if this had happened, would scholars have been justified in saying that the story of Little Glaus cannot have been known much earlier than the sixteenth century, when it appears in Straparola and in The Freiris of Berwik ? M. Foulet refuses to attend to folklore, to the Ananzi stories ] and in his dismissal of Uncle Remus he does not seem to see that he is making things easy for himself, and not exactly keeping the rules of the game.

Unibos, Andersen's Clans, Gampbell's Three Widows, which are all the same story, and which have their likeness also among the Ananzi stories, may possibly help with part of the Roman de Renart. It happens often enough that a folk-tale is defaced when it is turned into literary form. In Renart a well-known adventure is the Fox beguiling the Gadger, and stealing his herrings by pretending to be dead, and getting taken up in the Gadger's cart. This is in branche iii. The fish story is repeated