Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/397

 Shakespearian Stojy in Serbiari Folklo7'e. 8c

tradition. I have found it in three Serbian folk-songs But in these the moving forest only appears as a detail (See V. Krasic, Srp. nar. pjesme, 1880, Nos. 13-14 ; F. S Krauss, Die Russen vor Wien, Zeitschrift fiir vgl. Littera turgeschichte u. Reiinaissance Literatur, N.F. iii., 1890 P- 349)-

The motif of the moving forest found in Holinshed's Chronicle, whence Shakespeare took his plot of Macbeth occurs likewise in many other strangely assorted works — in Hector Boetius, History ; in Leukippos and Clitophones, a fourth-century Greek tale by Achilles Tatius ; in the Chronicles of the Persian historian Tabari (tenth century) : in the "Legend of Fredegonde," from the tenth-century Prankish Chronicle by Almoin ; in Gulielmo Thome's English Chronicle ; in the Gesta regnum Francorum, a work compiled about 720 ; in the Chronique de Saint Denis, a MS. in the Bibhotheque Nationale de Paris ; in Layamon's Brut, and in Branden's Mabinogiou. It is also found in several German and Arabian folk-tales.^

I cannot hazard any guess as to how this motif found its way into our Serbian songs and ballads. Perhaps it was through the Legends of Solomon. These legends frequently occur in Serbian mediaeval literature. We possess the famous legends to-day in three different Serbian MSS. The first is in the National Library in Belgrade and dates from the fourteenth century, the second is a fifteenth and sixteenth century MSS. in the National Library at Sofia, and the third, dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is in the Jugoslav Academy in Zagreb. Our tale follows the legend pretty closely in its details. Un- fortunately, however, it is precisely the moving forest which is lacking in the MSS.

How deeply this legend of the moving forest has taken root in the mind of our people may be seen from an authentic

1 Cf. Simrock, Halliwell, Kroeger; Erwin Rohde, Der griechiscbe- Roman, 1900, 516.