Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/128

120 appended the name of the relater—in many cases, women—but rarely any further particulars. The volume is dedicated to Dr. Pitré, under whose editorship it is published as the tenth volume of his Curiosità popolari Tradizionali.

Mr. Curtin has committed the fault of which Miss Hodgetts was guilty in her Tales and Legends from the Land of the Tzar, noticed in my last report; and it is the less excusable in a gentleman who dates his Introduction from the Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology, and who may therefore be presumed to write in an accurate and scientific spirit. His book consists of translations from Russian, Bohemian, and Magyar sources. But spirited as the translation is, and useful as it is to English students to have versions of these Slav and Magyar tales, it is annoying to have to find out for oneself whence the stories are taken, instead of being frankly told; and for a student's purpose the omission detracts from the value of the book. Two of the Russian stories have been already put before the English reader by the late Mr. Ralston, namely, "The Footless and Blind Champions", and "Marya Morevna"; the latter is also in Miss Hodgetts' volume. "Vasilissa the Cunning and the Tsar of the Sea" is apparently a variant of the tale given by Ralston as the "Water King and Vasilissa the Wise"; and the same relation seems to exist between "Ivan Tsarevich, the Fire Bird, and the Grey Wolf" of Mr. Curtin and Miss Hodgetts' "Grey Wolf and the Golden Cassowary". I have not traced any of the Bohemian tales; but the Magyar tale of "Mirko the King's Son" is included in Jones and Kropf's Folk-tales of the Magyars, published a year or two since by this Society. As the total number of stories in the volume is thirty-one, the proportion of duplicates with those previously in our hands is thus only a small one.

The tales Miss Garnett has to tell in her Women of Turkey are, like those in the previous volume noticed last year, translations of stories previously in print, and not collected by her. They are hardly the less welcome to