the work, but nothing additional has yet (1882) been issued. Several articles containing information on folk-lore are also included in the contents of a Malagasy work entitled Isan-kerin-taona, or “Annual,” but of which only two volumes (for 1876 and 1877) were published at the Friends’ Mission press in Antanànarìvo.
This historical introduction to the subject will indicate what has been done hitherto to make Malagasy folk-lore accessible to students, and how little is yet to be found translated into English, although a considerable amount is now printed from the native accounts, obtained either orally or in manuscript.
In this paper large use will be made of Mr. Dahle’s collections, partly because hardly any of these have yet been translated, and also because his book, although professing only to give “specimens” of Malagasy folk-lore, has a completeness of its own, as it includes examples of all the branches of this kind of literature, as well as some from all the chief provinces of the country.
Mr. Dahle says of his work that it is restricted to branches of folk-lore of which hardly anything has yet been published, viz. adages, riddles and conundrums, songs, oratorical flourishes of speech, children’s plays, bogey stories, and tales and fables. It does not include any strictly historical traditions, many of which are available; and although only printed for private circulation, Mr. Dahle thought it right to omit a good many pieces containing impure expressions and allusions, by which omissions the collection has been reduced very considerably. Whatever is found in the book is given full and unchanged, nothing being added by the editor but the descriptive headings. Mr. Dahle notes that many of the tales occur in different forms in different provinces, and that, had space allowed, other “variants” might have been added to those which are given in the work. He also says that, although care has been taken to include only purely native productions, it is possible that some of the elements contained in a few of them may have originated from or at least have been influenced by foreigners to a certain extent. Some of the tales, he remarks, “have a rather suspicious Oriental colour; while the curious ideas in some of them, the fine and florid, often very obscure, language of others, and the interesting form of not a few of the poetical pieces (e.g, the often very prominent parallelisms so characteristic of Oriental, and especially Hebrew, poetry), must claim the attention of many who are able to read them in the original.”
