Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/126

118 without feeling that one is in the presence of an experienced and sincere folk-lorist. His paragraphs are too long to quote; but they are well worthy of study by everyone who desires either himself to undertake the task of collection, or to appreciate the difficulties and the pleasures of the work wherein others are engaged, and to learn how to distinguish the true collection from the sham. Märchen, as he rightly says, are much harder to gather than any other kind of folk-lore—or at least any other kind of folk-tales; and the stories contained in the volume before us, unlike many of those in his Volkssagen, are given direct from the mouth of the people. All but two of them were taken down by himself. It is to be regretted, especially after Dr. Veckenstedt's charges, that Dr. Jahn has not thought proper to name the persons to whom he is indebted for them. This is a course that, I think, has never been taken in Germany, but the sooner it is begun the better. In the notes are to be found abstracts of variants, some of which are already in print. The stories in the text are well told, and bear the usual marks of popular narration. The Introduction contains, in addition to the remarks I have just referred to, some very instructive observations on the subject-matter and form of the tales, the relation between oral narratives in verse and prose—between singing and saying—and the changes undergone by the tales from time to time in the mouths of the folk. In the latter connection Dr. Jahn gives an instance of the transformations suffered by the story of Aladdin, learnt by heart by a servant-girl from an abridgment of the Arabian Nights, and from her by an accomplished reciter in her native village. When the author heard it from this man, nearly a generation later, it was in process of becoming a folk-tale once more, but not without adaptations to its new environment. Aladdin, the dirty, disobedient boy, for example, had been made into a red-haired, godless, Simple Simon of a fellow, who could neither read nor write, nor repeat even the Lord's Prayer correctly. The enchanted garden where the fruits were