Sixty Folk-Tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sixty Folk-Tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources, by Various, Translated by Albert Henry Wratislaw
Transcriber’s Note
Discrepancies between titles in the Table of Contents and in the main body of the text are preserved as printed. These are as follows (Table of Contents title first):
The Wondrous Lads and The Wonderful Boys .
The Miraculous Lock and The Wonder-Working Lock .
A Vila as a Friend and the Months as Friends and The Friendship of a Vila and of the Months .
Translated, with Brief Introductions and Notes,
BY A. H. WRATISLAW, M.A., Sometime Fellow and Tutor of Christ’s College, Cambridge; Late Head Master of Felsted and Bury St. Edmund’s Schools; Corresponding Member of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences.
LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 1889.

So much interest has lately been awakened in, and centred round, Folklore, that it needs no apology to lay before the British reader additional information upon the subject. Interesting enough in itself, it has been rendered doubly interesting by the rise and progress of the new science of Comparative Mythology, which has already yielded considerable results, and promises to yield results of still greater magnitude, when all the data requisite for a full and complete induction have been brought under the ken of the inquirer. The stories of most European races have been laid under contribution, but those of the Slavonians have, as yet, been only partially examined. Circumstances have enabled me to make a considerable addition to what is as yet known of Slavonic Folklore, although I cannot make any pretence to having exhausted the mine, or, rather, the many mines, which the various Slavonic races and tribes possess, and which still, more or less, await the advent of competent explorers.
In offering to the public a selection of sixty folklore stories translated from exclusively Slavonic sources, it is but fitting to give some account of the work from which I have derived them. In 1865, the late K. J. Erben, the celebrated Archivarius of the old town of Prague, published a ‘Citanka,’ or reading-book, intended to enable Bohemians to commence the study of all the numerous Slavonic dialects, containing ‘one hundred simple national tales and stories, in their original dialects.’ To this he appended a vocabulary, with explanations of words and forms strange to, or divergent from, the Bohemian, briefly given in the Bohemian language. This vocabulary is divided into two parts, one illustrating the tales of those Slavonians who make use of the Cyrillic characters, and belong to the Orthodox Greek Church; and the other, those of the Catholic and Protestant Slavonians, who employ alphabets founded on the Latin characters of the West of Europe. Pan Erben paid special attention to the preservation of the simple national forms of speech, as taken down from the lips of the people; and, besides laying printed collections under contribution, obtained several previously unpublished stories.