Though all have been collected by myself, I have only myself written down a very limited number from dictation. All the rest have been written for me in Sinhalese by the narrators themselves, or by other villagers employed by me to collect them, who wrote them just as they were dictated. I preferred this latter method as being free from any disturbing foreign influence. Only three very short stories were written down by me in English; two of them were related in English by a Sinhalese gentleman, and the other, a variant of another story, was written immediately after a Buddhist monk had related it to me in Sinhalese.
The stories, as they now appear, are practically literal translations of the written Sinhalese originals, perhaps it may be thought in some respects too literal. My aim has been to present them as nearly as possible in the words in which they are related in the villages. The only liberty of any importance that I have taken has been the insertion of an occasional word or phrase where it was evidently omitted by the narrator, or was necessary in order to elucidate the meaning, or complete the sense.
It was unavoidable that many expressions, such as “afterwards,” “after that,” “at that time,” “then,” “again,” with which the village story-teller repeatedly begins his sentences, should be deleted. Many past participles which Sinhalese grammar requires have been transformed into the past tense, and most of the tense errors have been corrected, and in rare instances an unmanageable sentence has been cut in two. Such a word as “came,” when it expressed “came back,” is sometimes translated “returned”; and “said,” where it referred to an answer, is occasionally turned into “replied.” The word translated as “behead,” is merely “cut” in the original; but the context sometimes shows that the other meaning is to be understood.
In other respects, the reader may rely on having here the tales in their true village forms, and expressed in the same simple manner. I have even left one peculiar idiom that is often used, according to which a question is described as being asked, or a statement made, “at the hand” of a person; but I do not follow the village story-teller in using this form in conversations carried on with the lower animals. It is quite usual in Sinhalese to state that a question was asked by a person “at the hand” (lit. “from the hand,” the same word meaning also “fore-paw”) of a jackal, a deer, or a reptile. It will be seen that I have not attempted to translate the interjections into English.
It will be noticed that in the majority of the tales the characters are introduced in the present tense, which is then abandoned. The narrators sometimes relapse into it afterwards, but as a rule, unless action is being emphasised, I have adhered to the past tense in such instances, excepting in the stories told by the Village Vaeddās and the lowest castes, in which it seemed advisable to make as little change as possible.
Attention may be invited to the tales told by the lowest castes, probably the only stories of theirs that have ever been collected in Ceylon. From the Tom-tom Beaters a considerable number were obtained, some of which will appear in a later volume. The few tales that have been told by the Roḍiyās and Kinnarās are very simple; the chief fact is that they have any to tell.
It appeared to be likely that some of the Sindbad series of adventures might be found in Ceylon, but inquiries made in different districts, including part of the west coast, failed to reveal any tales belonging to the “Arabian Nights,” with the exception of one which probably was derived from a printed work, and orally transmitted from one of the towns. It is still possible that some may be found, as the Rukh is included in the Sinhalese tales, and the ogre called Rākshasa, who is a familiar personage in them, is correctly described in his folk-tale form, in one of the Sindbad voyages. In one story, which is not included in this work, there is the incident of the demon who was imprisoned in a bottle. The demon was Māra, Death personified, and his captor was a Vedarāla, or medical practitioner. The age of the tale is uncertain.
It is evident that many of the stories belong to distant times, but there is little to indicate their age more definitely. In one tale only, of this volume, the money mentioned is the kahawaṇuwa, in old Sinhalese kahawaṇa, the Pāli kahāpaṇa, a coin that ceased to be current by the tenth or eleventh century A.D., if not considerably earlier. Commonly, we find that the coinage is the masurama, plural masuran, which came into use in the eleventh century and was not coined after the thirteenth; but of course this is far from proving that the stories in which it occurs are not of much earlier date. There are no references to the Portuguese, who arrived in Ceylon at the beginning of the sixteenth century, or to later foreign residents; but a Tamil king is mentioned.
Although a large number of the stories relate the adventures of Kings, Queens, Princes and Princesses, it will be observed that these personages sometimes behave like ordinary villagers. The Queen or Princess often cooks the rice for the family meal; Sir Bartle Frere has stated in the notes at the end of Old Deccan Days, p. 324, that this “would be nothing unusual in the house of a Rajah …. It is still the most natural precaution he can take against poison, to eat nothing but what has been prepared by his own wife or daughter, or under their eye in his own zenana, and there are few accomplishments on which an Indian Princess prides herself more than on her skill in cookery.”
It is not to be understood that such persons in these stories are supposed to be members of the family of the ruling monarch of Ceylon. These so-called “kings,” ruling over a small district or even a single city, are in reality some of the more important parumakas or feudal chiefs of the inscriptions of pre-Christian or early post-Christian years. This old title does not make its appearance in the stories, however.