Page:Turkish fairy tales and folk tales (1901).djvu/10

 in, and he warns the student of ethnology that when once the threatened railroad actually invades the classic land of Anatolia, these naively poetical myths and legends will, infallibly, be the first victims of Western civilization.

The almost unique collection of Dr. Ignatius Kunos may therefore be regarded as a brand snatched from the burning; in any case it is an important "find," as well for the scientific folk-lorist as for the lover of fairy-tales pure and simple. That these stories should contain anything absolutely new is, indeed, too much to expect. Professor Vámbery himself traces affinities between many of them and other purely Oriental stories which form the bases of The Arabian Nights. A few Slavonic and Scandinavian elements are also plainly distinguishable, such, for instance, as that mysterious fowl, the Emerald Anka, obviously no very distant relative of the Bird Mogol and the Bird Zhar, which figure in my Russian Fairy Tales and Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales respectively, while the story of the Enchanted Turban is, in some particulars, curiously like Hans Andersen's story, The Travelling Companion. Nevertheless, these tales have a character peculiarly their own; above all, they are remarkable for a vivid imaginativeness, a gorgeous