Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/199

Rh

When a traveller of Mr. Bent's archæological knowledge takes the trouble to go amongst the people themselves, picking up their lore, and noting the antiquities amidst which they live, one naturally looks for a book of some importance. This Mr. Bent gives us unquestionably, though we confess we do not appreciate his method of treatment. The Cyclades among the Greek islands are specially valuable for a study of Greek folk-lore, because they have been less subject to the influences of conquest than the Continent; and when Mr. E. B. Tylor, a few years ago, treated of the ethnology of Greece, we do not think he took this important fact into consideration. Mr. Bent found the relics here of old pagan polytheism, occasionally interpreted by a Christian terminology, but old Greek in spirit and oftentimes in detail. For folk-lore of the sea there could be no better source. Nereids abound on every coast, and, in some cases, Mr. Bent records a modern custom which looks remarkably like a sacrifice of a human being to these spirits—as, for instance, the leaving of a child on the altar of a church for a night to see if the Nereid claimed it for its own. Songs and dances, marriage customs, birth customs, and funeral customs, noted down as they were observed, meet us on almost every page of Mr. Bent's book; and he particularly draws attention to the importance of the incantations which accompanied the charms. There is a passage in Plato's Laws which treats of charms and incantations, and it tells us that the accompanying songs were essential to success. The modern Greek charm is almost always accompanied with a rhyming or rhythmical incantation; and it is a thought worth bearing in mind by the student of folk-lore that the various charms to be met with in European folk-lore are more archaic if they have a rhythmical accompaniment. Another subject which Mr. Bent treats of in a most interesting manner is that of "games." But perhaps the most curious portions in his volume are those which tell us of the modern Greek notion of the planets, the sun, and dawn. They are certainly personified. The sun is still to them a giant, like Hyperion, blood-