Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/547

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Reviews.
489

make offerings before conical stones of a very similar form to the cairn (p. 118).

The folk-songs of the Westman islanders include Icelandic versions of English music-hall ditties, which have a habit of travelling round the world. "A bicycle built for two" has been translated into Icelandic, and also into Malay, where it is sung even in remote Patani (p. 119).

The little auk does not breed in the Westman Islands, but occasionally appears there, and the islanders think it to be the halcyon of the Greeks and call it halkjon, crediting it with the legend that it builds a floating nest on the sea with its own feathers (p. 126).

These specimens of the interesting facts collected by Mr. Annandale will, we hope, induce many readers to consult his work, which does not contain a single tiresome page. An appendix by Dr. F. H. A. Marshall, Carnegie Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh, discusses the origin of the Celtic Pony.

Edward Brabrook.

The Shade of the Balkans, being a collection of Bulgarian Folk-songs and Proverbs, here for the first time rendered into English, together with an essay on Bulgarian Popular Poetry, and another on the Origin of the Bulgar. Nutt. 1904. 7s. 6d. net.

The authors of this book appear to be Mr. Henry Bernard and Dr. E. J. Dillon, although their names do not stand on the title page; the material has been supplied by, or through, one Pencho Slaveikoff, "the caged lion of Sofia." We do not find that either of the authors knows Bulgarian, nor does the caged lion know English. The caged lion recited his material to the authors in German. If they decided to include it in the book, he gave a "more accurate rendering" in German, and repeated a few lines in Bulgarian that Mr. Bernard might preserve the metre;