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piler to give the mouse-deer a place in popular tales of a different description, and thus to include them in his hikayat.
This is true for example of the story in bhaïh 10, where the plandōʾ fulfils the rôle of judge, which properly appertains to a human being; for no mention is to be found of the mouse-deer in the European and Javanese[1] versions of this story.
On the other hand the author has omitted other tales which well deserved to be included both on account of their characteristic qualities and their popularity in Acheh.
Thus for instance he leaves out the race with the snails which appears in the Javanese kanchil series[2], but is also universally known in Acheh.
More data than we possess would be of course required to enable us in each case of striking agreement of one of these Achehnese stories with a Malay, Sundanese, or Javanese version, to decide whether it is the common inheritance of the race or has been imported from elsewhere through some foreign channel of literature.
We now append a short list of the contents of the 26 sections.
Bhaïh 1. The plandōʾ, the frog, the gardener and the dog (just as in Jav.). In a Sundanese "dongeng of the ape and the tortoise", which I got transcribed at Bantěn, the ape plays the part here assigned to the frog and the dog, while the tortoise takes the place of the mouse-deer. The sequel of this dongeng corresponds with that which is here found in Bhaïh 5. It much more nearly resembles the contents of our Bhaïhs 1 and 5 than the version published in Sundanese by A. W. Holle in 1851, and those composed by A. F. Von de Wall (Batavia, Kolff 1885) in Batavian Malay, and by K. F. Holle (Batavia, Kolff 1885) in Dutch.
Bhaïh 2. The plandōʾ, the otter, the night-owl, the gatheuëʾ (a sort of land prawn?) the land crab, the snail, the biëng phō (a small sort of prawn?) and the prawn.
This fable is akin to that of "the otter and the crab" published in
- ↑ A story the main features of which are the same, is to be found in De vermakelijhe lotgevallen van Tijl Uilenspiegel (the delightful adventures of Tijl Uilenspiegel) pub. by J. Vlieger, Amsterdam, p. 66. A similar one was written down by me at the dictation of a Javanese dongèng-reciter at Jogjakarta.
- ↑ We refer here to Het boek van den kantjil (the book of the kanchil) published by the Koninklijk Instituut at the Hague, 1889, and the Sěrat kanchil pub. at Samarang, 1879. In our epitome of the contents we refer to these two versions, for the sake of brevity, by the contraction Jav.
