Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/335

 War drop. — Georgian Folk-Tales. 327

fore, to compare the two versions — always an advantage to students who have no access to the original.

It may be said generally of the stories that they are variants of the common stock of Europe. But, though we recognise old friends, they are old friends in strange garb. Take, for instance, Conkiajgharuna, which is the charming name of the Georgian Cinderella. Here we get the familiar step-mother and step-sister, and the magical cow. We do not expect, however, to find the cow running away on to a roof, in order to introduce the heroine to the notice of the beneficent, if unattractive-looking devi who lives below. This is not so extraordinary to a Georgian peasant as to us, because the houses in some parts of the Caucasus are built in the ground, so that we may walk on the roof without knowing it. Nor is it usual that Cinderella should, in returning from church, lose her golden slipper in a stream, and that it should be found by the king's horses, not by the king's men. And when the king comes in to try the slipper on the ugly step-sister, and sits down on the basket under which Cinderella has been hidden by her step-mother, it is hardly in accordance with western notions of propriety, whether within or without a fairy tale, that she should repeatedly stick a needle into his majesty from beneath, until he jumps up and finds her ; or that then she should come forth and unblushingly observe, without any diffidence or apology : " This slipper is mine, and fits me well."

So in the story of The Two Thieves (a variant of King Rhampsinitus' Treasury) the king has a hind, whose property it is to " fall on its knees before the house of him who is guilty against the king." I am not acquainted with this machinery for discovering the clever thief in any other version of the story. In the same way most of the tales have some peculiarity, pointing either to the special customs or scenery of Georgia, or at least to a state of culture more rudimentary than we are accustomed to in European tales. They ought thus to prove useful in the great Transmission Controversy.