Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/100

92 the Elopement is found only in Pitre's Sicilian collection (p. 167), Mr. Crane seems to have overlooked the version in Miss Busk's Folk-Lore of Rome, p. 399, entitled "The Grace of the Hunchback." The most interesting portion of this chapter is perhaps that which comprises Italian popular versions of the frame-story of the Persian Tútí Náma, or Parrot-Book, which are both curious and significant. The idea of these different versions, from Pisa, Florence, Piedmont, and Sicily, may have been derived through the Turks, to whom that famous Persian story-book has long been familiar from a translation of it in their own language. In the Italian versions the parrot relates one or more tales to divert a lady during her husband's (or father's) absence, as in the Tútí Náma and the Indian Suka Saptatí (Seventy Tales of a Parrot); they could not have been imitated from the well-known story (in the Seven Sages) of the parrot, or magpie, left behind him by a merchant to note the conduct of his wife while he is abroad, for that bird does not relate any stories to the lady, who, indeed, has another kind of amusement. Possibly the incident of the parrot and the maina in one of the traditions of Rájá Rasálú (see Temple's Legends of the Panjáb, vol. i.) may have suggested the frame-story of both the Indian and Persian Parrot-Books. The tales related by the parrots in the Italian versions do not seem, however, to be of Asiatic origin. The concluding tale in this chapter, "Truthful Joseph," furnishes another instance of the influence of the Turks in Southern Europe: it is told in the Qirq Vezír, Forty Vazírs, of the Sultan's Master of the Horse.

The fourth chapter contains legends and ghost stories, which may be said to constitute Christian folk-lore, a striking characteristic of so many of the popular tales of Iceland and Norway. It is very remarkable that several of these legends, in which the Lord and St. Peter figure prominently, seem not to be, as one should naturally suppose, European in their conception, but of Muhammadan extraction; legends very similar being related of Jesus by Arabian writers. The story of "The Lord, St. Peter, and the Blacksmith" (p. 188) has its parallels in Germany, Norway, and Russia—in the latter country the Devil is represented as the operator—and also in an old black-letter English metrical tale, entitled, "Of the Smyth that