Grimms had some Kalmuck stories.[1] One or two Chinese and Japanese examples had fallen into their hands, and all this as early as 1822. In later years they picked up a Malay story, some Bechuana tales, Koelle's Kanuri or Bornu stories, Schoolcraft's and James Athearn Jones's North American legends, Finnish, Esthonian, and Mongolian narratives, and an increasing store of European contes. The Grimms were thus not unaware that the märchen, with their surprising resemblances of plot and incident, had a circulation far beyond the limits of the Aryan peoples. They were specially struck, as was natural, by the reappearance of incidents analogous to those of the German contes (such as Machandelboom and the Singing Bone, 47, 28) among the remote Bechuanas of South Africa. They found, too, that in Sierra Leone beasts and birds play the chief parts in märchen. "They have a much closer connection with humanity, . . . nay, they have even priests," as the animals in Guiana have peays or sorcerers of their own. "Only the beasts of the country itself appear in the märchen." Among these Bornu legends they found several tales analogous to Faithful John (6), and to one in Straparola's Piacevoli Notti (Venice, 1550), a story, by the way, which recurs among the Santals, an "aboriginal" tribe of India. It is the tale of the man who knows the language of animals, and is warned by them against telling secrets to women. Among the Indians of North America Grimm found the analogue of his tale (182)
- ↑ "The Relations of Ssidi Kür," in Bergmann's Nomadische Streifereien, vol. i.
