“ In olden times, huge giants existed in this world. They were so big that they could put one leg on the top of one mountain and the other on the next one. They reached as high as the heavens, and getting hold of the handles of the great gate would shake it as a man shakes a kettle. They even rebelled against God, for they knew no fear. At last, God, realising their nature, decided to destroy them, and he sent a flood which covered the highest mountains, so that you could not see of them as much as the black under the nail. ”

“ I have made thee headman and judge and emperor, and thou lackest nothing. Thou art not in want of anything. Now, because thou hast become impudent and insolent, for thy impious wishes thou shalt be punished. From the man thou hast been thou shalt henceforth be a bird, restless, without peace, and without quiet, flitting from tree to tree, and from branch to branch, always dissatisfied, without a home, without a family, and thy name shall be Cuckoo. ”

“ When God grew old he wanted to marry the sun. He invited all the creatures. Among them also the devil, but he saddled his ass and rode away angrily. Then God sent the bee to find out the thought of the devil. The bee settled on his head and heard him mumble to himself:
“Oh yes, it is a long time since God had remembered me, who helped him in the making of the world, but he does not know what he is doing now. If he marries the sun he will destroy mankind and burn up the world.” ”

“ Roaming about, the hawk suddenly lighted upon the nest of the crow. Seeing the little, miserable, ugly things in the nest, the hawk at first would not touch them, although she never dreamt that these ugly things were the children of the crow, so much praised by her for their beauty, and thought they must belong to some hideous bird. But what is one to do when one is hungry? One eats what one gets and not finding anything better, she sat down and gobbled them up one by one, and then flew away. ”

“ The first to appear before God was man. And God said to him, “Thou, man, shalt be king of the world, walking erect upon thy feet and looking up to heaven. I give thee a noble countenance; the power of thought and judgment shall be thine, and the capacity of disclosing thy innermost thoughts by means of speech. All that lives and moves and goes about the earth shall be under thy rule, the winged birds and the creeping things shall obey thee, thine shall be all the fruits of the tree and land, and thy life shall be thirty years.” ”

“ Peradventure one or the other may be taken out and planted anew in the nurseries of the West, where they may blossom and grow afresh. They might bring with them the breath of the open field, the perfume of the forest. They might conjure up the time when the nations were still young and lived in the great Nursery of Nature. If one could only bring to the nations of the West for awhile a glimpse of the time of their youth! ”

“ Thou seest, Peter, what that brother of mine—”
“You mean the devil?” interposed St. Peter.
“Yes,” said God, “I mean him. You see what he has done to me with Adam and Eve, and how he made me drive them out of Paradise. What was I to do? When the poor man was starving I had to help him, so I gave him the sheep to feed him and to clothe him. But dost thou think the devil will give them peace?—no, not he!”
“Yes,” said Peter, “all very well, but what about the dog? I know all that about Adam and Eve.” ”

“ Thou shalt no longer remain a human being, thou shalt become a bird flying as high as to get near the sun, and there, seeing the beloved who cannot be thine, thou shalt cry plaintively for him whom thou hast won and yet lost.” At that moment Little Light was changed into the lark, which at the break of dawn, before the sun rises, flies up into the sky trying to get as near as possible to the sun, and there cries plaintively at the loss of her beloved. ”

“ Then the Lady Mary became more comforted, and said to the swallows: “Ye swallows from this day on shall be the cleanest birds on the face of the earth, and the house at which you build your nests will be a happy one, and whoever destroys your nest shall be cursed.” The Lady Mary went on her way, and passing on her way she met a spider weaving his web, and a mouse burrowing in the ground. When they saw her weeping they mocked at her, and said: “In vain dost thou weep and cry. Know that thy son is dead; he will never come to life again, although thou mayest believe it.” ”

“ One has only to cast a glance at the medley of nationalities inhabiting the Balkan Peninsula and the neighbourhood to realise the profound differences of faith, origin and language of Greeks and Albanians, Slavs and Rumanians, Hungarians and Saxons, and one is forced to the conclusion that whatever these may possess in common is not a survival from olden times, but must have come to them at a time when they were all living together in that part of Europe, subject to one common influence strong enough to leave an indelible impression on their imagination. ”

“ Rise up, O husband, open the doors, wake up the servants and let them be a witness of my faithfulness to thee, for since I have married thee I have left my mother, and my sisters have gone away from me, and from a swan I have become a true wife to live in happiness with thee. Henceforth I shall no longer be a swan, but thou must take care of me that I do not go hence from thee. I do not know whether my fate will be a better one by being a queen in this world. ”

“ They are the materialised spirit of the nation, and whither they go that spirit also goes. Spirit communes thus with spirit. There is and there has always been such a give and take. And it is for us to follow up this constant barter, in which the richer unhesitatingly parted with their treasures to the poor, for the more they gave the more was left with them, as is meet in the charmed realm of folk-lore.
These nations learn from one another not only words, but the thoughts and ideas expressed in words. ”

“ It is a wonderful picture for any one who is able to discover the forces that are at work, who can trace every strand of the webbing, every thread in the woof and warp, to its immediate and to its remoter source. We see the shuttle of human imagination, of human belief, flying busily through the loom, charged at one time with one thread, at another with a different one. ”

“ The religious fanatic starts from the heart, with overwhelming passion, fiery zeal, unreasoning hatred, from which there is a possible escape for mysticism and mythical lore, whilst from the former there is none. Happily, our science of folk-lore with its deep sympathy and profound appreciation of these manifestations of the popular psyche has come in the nick of time to rescue from total extinction what the schoolmaster and the heresy-hunter have not yet annihilated.
I turn now to another aspect of these bird and beast tales. ”

“ The sparrow, feeling ashamed and angered at the words of the little sapling, replied: “Very well, I am going, but when thou shalt be on thy death-bed I will come back, and thou wilt have to render me account for these offensive words which thou hast spoken to me.” And the sparrow went away.
Now it is known that an oak lives for nine hundred years: for three hundred years it grows in strength and might, the next three hundred it rests quiet, and during the last three hundred it slowly decays and dies. ”

“ At that moment a man passed by, and hearing the shrieking of the snake, who begged him to save her from the flames, he took pity on her, and cutting a long stick, he reached with it up to the top of the tree for the snake to glide down on it. But he did not know the mind of the cunning beast, which had aforetime deceived his forefather Adam, for, instead of gliding down to the ground, no sooner did the snake reach the neck of the good man than she coiled herself round and round his neck. ”

“ In these tales and legends we have syncretism in full swing. It is not a picture of the past which we have to piece laboriously together from half-forgotten records, from writing half obliterated by the action of time and by changes which have swept over those nations of the past, whose life and thought we are endeavouring to conjure up and to understand. In our midst, at our door, under our own eyes, this process of mixing and adjusting, of change and evolution, of differentiation, combination and assimilation is still going on. ”

“ Every collection of fairy tales teems with them. Of course, the æsthetic pleasure of seeing innocence triumphant and virtue rewarded might be a sufficient motive, and no doubt often is. The people like to see, in the imaginary tale, a vindication of the justice which they often miss in real life. The adventurous hero will also appeal to the chivalrous instincts of the people, and especially to the young. Such tales as the epic romances of old require no further explanation. Still there are a good many fairy tales the reason and meaning of which are anything but clear. ”

“ Getting into the ark the devil changed himself into a mouse.
When the devil has nothing to do he weighs his tail. But here he found plenty to do, for, he thought, now is an opportunity of putting an end to the whole of God’s creatures. So he started gnawing on one of the planks, trying to make a hole in it. When Noah surprised him at this devilish work he threw his fur glove at him. It turned into a cat, and, in the twinkling of an eye, the mouse was in the mouth of the cat. ”

“ The Rumanian animal tales, which appear here for the first time outside Rumania, are so weird, so different from any known to the folk-lore of the West, that they arrest our attention and invite close examination. They are, for the most part, not only beautiful in themselves, but by reason of a peculiar flight of fancy and a powerful imagination are so unlike anything known in other collections of folk-lore that they raise problems far reaching, and, I venture to think, of the highest importance to the study of popular literature. ”

“ And God was angry at the impudence of the bee, and replied: “All the honey shall be thine alone, if thou art able to make a gallon of it during the summer: if not, man may share it with thee. And because thou hast asked for the power of killing with thy sting, meaning to kill man by it, thine own death shall be by thy sting.”
This is the reason why the bees work so industriously and indefatigably during the summer. Each hopes to make a gallon of honey, but they can never succeed. And this, too, is the reason why the bee dies when it stings anyone. ”

“ There is one characteristic feature in the collection of animal tales and legends given here, upon which I should like to lay great stress, and that is the complete purity which pervades them all. There is no playing with moral principles. No double meaning is attached to any story: and this, to my mind, is the best proof of their popular origin. These tales are not sullied by a morbid imagination, nor contaminated by sexual problems. The people are pure at heart and in the stories their simplicity and purity appear most beautifully. ”

“ In the same manner ancient customs, ancient beliefs and ancient tradition have been caught in the liquid tales, apologues and legends, like the fly in the amber, and carried along with them from East to West. In this manner they may perhaps be termed survivals, but survivals of a different kind than has been assumed hitherto. They have survived only as long as they were tolerated in the lore of the people.
Hand in hand with dissemination go the assimilation and localisation of these diverse elements. ”

“ In the first place, it is put on record, on the irrefutable evidence of the modern languages themselves, that there is no nation in Europe which speaks a language of its own so pure as to be free from admixture with foreign elements. All owe their very origin, in fact, to this clash of languages, which was the determining factor in their creation and form. ”

“ Dost thou see that my word has come true, thou proud tree of the forest, now thy head is lying low and thou hast been changed into dust, thou hast been humbled, whilst I am still living on in strength, and I am now as I have then been.” This longevity of the sparrow makes him the dread of the peasants and farmers, and among the means taken to save the crops from the inroads of this pest are magical practices and charms. ”

“ Know that the woodpecker was originally not a bird but an old woman with a very long nose, which she put into everybody’s pots and pans, sniffing about, eavesdropping, inquisitive and curious about everything whether it belonged to her or not, adding a little in her tale-bearing and taking off a bit from another tale, and so making mischief among her neighbours. ”

“ How easily, then, could a philologist of the eighteenth century, who wanted to compare these languages among themselves, by collecting similar words haphazard prove that Rumanian was Turkish, that Hungarian was Slavonic and that Bulgarian was Greek, or on finding some Albanian words in Rumanian and Bulgarian how easily could he declare these languages to be survivals of the ancient mythical Pelasgians with whom the Albanians were connected. ”

“ From the moment that we find in Europe similar beast tales to those found among primitive peoples in other parts of the world, we are confronted by a new problem. We may recognise the same spiritual agency at work: we may see the same action of the mind, asking everywhere for an explanation of the phenomena from beast and bird, from sky and sea. Thus far the minds of all the nations run on parallel lines. The differentiation begins with the answer, and here, then, the problem sets in. How many nations give the same answer, and in so doing form, as it were, a group by themselves? ”