Leonard Cyril Wharton

“ According to a note by Krolmus, a black lady announces death in the district of Saatz and a white lady in the neighbourhood of Rakovnik. At Luštěnice they know a tale that a white lady appears to the woman whose husband is going to die. She comes down the chimney and makes a noise like a sheet of paper; if this rustling is to be heard, the woman will not dare to appear. [Vdati, usually = marry!] The men whose wives are to die see the white lady. ”

“ Every "hrad" (fortified enclosure) in Bohemia has its White Lady. A long list from Balbín is given. It is a very simple story, of a mere vision. It also appears in the ruins of a "hrad." So at Tetín. The story is mostly elaborated by accretions from elsewhere. General references to the White Lady usually mean the one of the Rosenberg and Hradec families, the founder of the soft pap. (They claim descent from a mythical ancestor Vítka, hence Vitkovec.) ”

“ The White Lady becomes in certain cases the guardian of a treasure on a hill. This is found in German as well as Bohemian sources. Sometimes she brings out the treasure herself, sometimes merely shows where it is.
3. The child forgotten in the hill and the White Lady. The child is left in the hill at one of the seasons (Good Friday, Passiontide) when it is open, and there are treasures there. The child's mother is a poor widow. After a year the mother finds the child, who has been guarded by the White Lady, according to some of the stories. A few variants exist. ”

“ Other Bohemian and German cases.
In Carlstein district a white lady appears at midnight before a sick man's house and asks. Are they all at home? If so, she says whether the sick man will die or not. If all are not at home, she says she can't wait longer and the sick man will die. Cf. Grohmann, p. 70. The white lady of this tale has yet somehow another character; it is the white lady of the castle of Carlstein; she announced the death of the castle citizens, and then the people saw it in the lower castle. ”

“ Salaba explains the sad part of the story by carrying the German story into Bohemia after 1600, but there are evidences throwing the Bohemian popular tradition back into the sixteenth century, and this destroys his theory. But it is certain that new foreign elements associated themselves with the Bohemian tradition: this took place not later than the sixteenth century, from South Germany, perhaps direct from Bayreuth. The Rosenbergs had it first, then the Hradec family. In the seventeenth century White Ladies multiplied as a piece of Jesuit machinery. ”

“ The most important essay is a revision of an article of 1893 in Wisla on what the author has called "metabiose," the belief that the soul was bound to stay in some part of the body after death, or at least in contact with it. ”

“ A white lady appeared to two men who were looking for a treasure and told them that they will not find a treasure, unless they lie down on the ground, etc. But they could not endure that test. Various German parallels are quoted. Three white ladies appear in the ruins of Herstein, according to a tale from Domažlicko. ”

“ The collection contains 732 examples, printed in three columns—the first containing the Sechuana proverbs, the second a literal translation, the third parallels from European collections. “In the dark people hold to one another’s cloaks”—“Adversity makes strange bedfellows”; “The early riser alone gets it, not the late riser”—“The early bird catches the worm”; “Those who pick wild berries in the same wood do not love each other”—“Two of a trade seldom agree”; “A potter eats out of a broken dish”—“A shoemaker’s wife is never well shod.” ”

“ Their spirits guard their father's treasure.
On the night of Palm Sunday it is possible to see them there; they will be rescued by a chaste youth who will raise the treasure that night. This tale arose on the basis of some historical event and of the tales of the freeing of an enchanted white lady. Pomeranian and German parallels given.
6. The White Lady announces an unlucky event. This unlucky event is mostly death: the White Lady is the ambassadress of death.
The tale, "The White and Black Lady, or the Woman," in Krolmus, ii. ”

“ Much of the "popular" tradition is merely literary invention, and has to be distinguished from the real traditional material, especially as the literature has really influenced the genuine popular tradition. The Beautiful Olivia, or the Terror in the White Tower: a true tale of the Thirteenth Century. Translated into Bohemian from Procopius the Hoary. Prague, 1798 (reprints 1844, 1858) . This is the first popular booklet. The original—not as in Procopius—is in Spiess's Biographien der Selbstmörder, 1785. Variants of this German story from Bohemia are in Th. ”

“ In the May number J. Horák and O. Zich discuss Bohemian popular songs from both the literary and musical sides, and in June J. Veselý has an article on marionettes and their makers and workers. In the September-October number V. Tille gives an account of the ceremony of beheading the cock at the small Bohemian village of Brná, in which a "Jew" and an "old woman" are characters. There is also a review of V. Flajšhaus's Česká přísloví, a collection of proverbs in Bohemian which will take its place beside Dal's Russian, Frank's Ruthenian, and Zaturecký's Slovene collections. ”

“ He takes examples from an article on "Czech and Slovak Folk Songs" in the Warsaw Dzwon Literacki, of 1847, by O. Kolberg, the great Polish collector of ballad poetry. Apart from errors of language-classification (Slovak as a Bohemized Polish dialect! etc.) , he proceeds to set out Kolberg's examples, taken down in Warsaw from Slovak wiredrawers [1] who spend the winter in the borders of German and Slavonic lands. Sreznevsky made similar collections from a similar source.
There are twenty-one songs, of which he prints a considerable part of the text of the last:
To je kratké—to je dluhe. ”

“ The text is quoted from Erben, and his explanation of the well-known erotic significance of the apple is given. Erben gave no variants, although he had seven texts. That they came from the same two districts (N.E. Bohemia) does not much lessen the curiosity of the point. The greatly increased modern facilities still show that this is, according to M. Horák, a hapax legomenon in Bohemian and Slavonic popular poetry. ”

“ In the May number are extracts from a Jesuit's account in Latin of seventeenth-century popular beliefs at Bechyn in Bohemia, and a review of J. Belovic-Bernadzikovska's Erotische Einschlage in den Stickornamenten der Serben. This study of the symbolism of lace breaks new ground ”