The Seafaring of Snegdus and MacRiagla; MacConglinne's Vision. Professor Thurneysen's introduction and notes are, as might be expected from a scholar of his standing, adequate, but one expected more from him. As all the stories have been translated into English or French, his work appeals exclusively to the German reader, who may fairly complain of the Professor's choice of the shorter version of MacConglinne instead of that longer version, the gem of Irish humorous story-telling and the finest example in all literature, outside Rabelais himself, of the Rabelaisian style.—Alfred Nutt.
King Horn. A Middle English Romance, edited from the MSS. by Joseph Hall. Demy 8vo., lvi. 240 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Whilst the interest of this admirably executed edition is mainly linguistic, the student of English romance cannot but be glad to possess a perfectly faithful text, in the three extant versions, of what may be called the earliest English romance, and of the much later handling of the subject, Horn Childe. The section of Mr. Hall's Introduction which deals with the story, whilst very brief yet successfully vindicates the anteriority of the English poem over the Anglo-Norman Horn et Rimenhild, and traces it back ultimately to a saga "based on events which actually occurred in the south-west of England during the English Conquest," and adapting an earlier British tradition "arising out of some temporary success in which the Cornish, aided by the Irish, checked the westward progress of the English." The various features of folklore and romance interest are adequately dealt with in the notes.—Alfred Nutt.
Cilibi Moise, Practica si apropourile lui, Vestitul în Teara romaneasca, adunate si aranjate dupa materii si precedate de Biografia lui Cilibi Moise De M. Schwarzfeld. Ed. ii. Bucuresti, 1901.
A systematised arrangement of popular saws and aphorisms, mostly the product of a man whose education had been quite neglected, who was unable to write, and who had to dictate to the printer many of these sentences and wise aphorisms. They appeared in yearly small volumes, in an edition of upwards of 10,000 copies, thus enjoying fabulous popularity in Roumania. The folkloristic value of this collection consists in the fact that a large number of these aphorisms have entered the popular mind,
