Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/334

 326 Reviews.

amiable attributes. Cinderella is shod with gold, and warned to quit the ball before the cock crows for the third time. Lowe omitted the tale from his translations from Kreutzwald's collection. M. Dido published a summary of it last year in the Revtie des Traditions Populaires ; but Mr. Kirby's is much fuller. Mr. Kirby professes on his title-page to be only a compiler. From this example it will be seen that he is a compiler who has rendered a real service to students by providing them not merely with an account of the Esthonian epic, but also with other material hitherto only found in its original language.

E. Sidney Hartland.

Georgian Folk - Tales, translated by Margery Wardrop. London: D. Nutt, 1894. Grimm Library, Vol. L

This is the first collection of Georgian folk-tales published in the English language. In the year 1888 M. Mourier issued in French, under the title of Contes et Legendes du Caucase, nine Georgian, six Mingrelian, and six (or rather five, for the last is not a tale) Armenian tales, hardly more than half the number of the stories in Miss Wardrop's volume, which contains sixteen Georgian, eight Mingrelian, and fourteen Gurian tales, besides a couple of pages of Mingrelian proverbs. The mountaineers of the Caucasus present many points of special interest to students of folk- lore, and it is greatly to be deplored that almost all that is known about their customs and superstitions is locked up in the mysterious recesses of their own or the Russian language. Hence this volume is doubly welcome. The stories are naively told, and bear the stamp of genuine- ness. Moreover, they are translated into excellent, idiomatic English. Like M. Mourier, Miss Wardrop has gone to Professor Tsagareli's Mingrelian Studies for the originals of the stories in Part II, and we are able, there-