Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/210

 200 World, but I have failed entirely to find any trace of it in English literature. Nor does it appear in the Scotch or Irish versions of the Alexander-Romance.

II.

One of the most striking features of the scholarship of the present day is the care with which editors seek to unravel the sources of the documents they are investigating. Many a scholar of sixty or seventy years past would be sorely disconcerted could he but see the manner in which works edited by him as original compositions of this or that ancient author have now come to be analyzed and set down as mere compilations from previously existing materials. Such is emphatically the case with the mediaeval Alexander literature.

When thirty years ago Professor Wesselofsky came to study the version of the Alexander-Romance current among the Slavonic nations and the Rumanians, which he calls the Serbian version, he was easily able to establish the fact that many of the incidents in the journey of Alexander to the land of the Blessed or his intercourse with the Brahmans and their king Dindimus or Dandamis, as well as his journey to the fount of life, occur already in Christian legends of the second and third centuries, in the lives of Zosimos and in the apocryphal account of Macarius of Rome and his three companions. Others, too, have succeeded in tracing certain details to a Chaldaean source, the Babylonian history of Gilgames.