Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/240

 214 the whole of Europe. One or two specimens taken at random will suffice to show their general character.

The condition of the original manuscript is evidence of its having been well used; and an immense number of current popular beliefs which belong to the same mental attitude are brought together in vol. ix. of this series. The same volume contains more than a hundred specimens of the dialects of Jutland, and a collection of stories relating to priests and parish-clerks, many of which are of undoubted authenticity and extremely amusing.

The publication of five volumes (nearly 2,000 pages) in one department of folklore would have exhausted the material as well as the energy of most collectors. Not so with Kristensen. Finding that his original series of Jyske Folkeminder was inadequate to contain the stores he still had in hand, he began in 1892 a new series of "Danish Legends" (Danske Sagn) taken entirely from unprinted sources^ and exclusively devoted to this class of popular traditions. Five volumes of this series have already appeared, and present a mass of legend which is as varied in character as it is enormous in bulk.