Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/109

Edmund Veckenstedt. In the year 1883, Dr. Veckenstedt published, at Heidelberg, what purported to be a collection of folk-tales of the Zhamaites, a Lithuanian people on the shores of the Baltic, identified with the Samogitians. Doubts had long been hinted by M. Gaidoz as to the real character of this collection; but there the matter remained. Last year, however, a severe article in Mélusine on a subsequent essay by Dr. Veckenstedt called forth from him a retort, which it must be admitted was mere abuse of his distinguished critic. By way of answer to this, in the September-October number of Mélusine appeared an article of twenty-four columns by M. J. Carlowicz, a Polish savant, containing the following definite charges against Dr. Veckenstedt, which were then for the first time published in a tongue accessible to Western students. M. Carlowicz declares Dr. Veckenstedt to be absolutely ignorant alike of the Zhamaite speech, and of Polish and Russian. His philologies are pronounced mistaken; the names of the Zhamaite deities whom he brings upon the scene are sometimes impossible, sometimes mere blunders, sometimes names of common objects ennobled by capital letters. As often as not the gods and their names are taken from a work by John Lasicki, written in 1580 and printed in 1615, entitled De diis Saniagitarum, which, under the guise of a Zhamaite mythology, was a satire upon the superstitions of the Roman Catholic Church. A large portion of Dr. Veckenstedt's work deals with the legends of a mythical king. In 1880 the Doctor had published a volume of Wendish sagas from Lusatia, of which a considerable number were occupied with a mythical king of the Wends. M. Carlowicz gives a long list of identical particulars relating to both these kings, such as the age (fourteen years) of his first manifestation, his curing men and cattle, his reception by his people with scorn and anger, dogs are silenced at the sight of him, he is invulnerable, his boat, his flying chariot, his leathern bridge which twists together at his will, his sword adorned with a serpent, his military manoeuvres, his soldiers made of