Turkish fairy tales and folk tales

TURKISH FAIRY TALES
Collected by Dʳ. Ignácz Kúnos Translated from the Hungarian version By R.Nisbet.Bain. Illustrated by Celia Levetus London A. H. Bullen 18 Cecil Court, W.C. 1901


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 play of fancy, compared with which the imagery of the most popular fairy tales of the West seem almost prosaically jejune, and if, as Professor Vámbery suggests, these Népmések provide the sort of entertainment which beguiles the leisure of the Turkish ladies while they sip their mocha and whiff their fragrant narghilies, we cannot but admire the poetical taste and nice discrimination, in this respect, of the harem and the seraglio.
I have Englished these tales from the first Hungarian edition, so that this version is, perhaps, open to the objection of being a translation of a translation. Inasmuch, however, as I have followed my text very closely, and having regard to the fact that Hungarian and Turkish are closely cognate dialects (in point of grammatical construction they are practically identical), I do not think they will be found to have lost so very much of their original fragrance and flavour.