Rumanian Bird and Beast Stories Rendered into English. Anonymous

1845). The Pilgrimage of the Soul is from S. Mangiuca, Călindariu, pe. 1882, Braşiovu 1881 and the Story of Man and his Years, No. 113, from M. Gaster, Chrestomatie Romăna, vol. ii., Bucharest 1891. These tales have been collected from every country where Rumanians live, not only in the Kingdom of Rumania, but also from the Rumanians of Transylvania and Bukovina, as well as from the Kutzo-Vlachs of Macedonia.

      I have added a few charms and also a few more mystical religious songs and carols, which throw light on some of the beliefs underlying the tales and legends, taken mostly from the great collection of G. Dem. Teodorescu (Poesii Popularare Romăne, Bucharest 1885).

      In some cases I have given also variants of the same tale.

      I have endeavoured to render the stories as faithfully as the spirit of the Rumanian and English languages allows, and I fear that I have on sundry occasions forced the latter in my desire to preserve as far as possible the quaintness and the flavour of the Rumanian original.

      There is one characteristic feature in the collection of animal tales and legends given here, upon which I should like to lay great stress, and that is the complete purity which pervades them all. There is no playing with moral principles. No double meaning is attached to any story: and this, to my mind, is the best proof of their popular origin. These tales are not sullied by a morbid imagination, nor contaminated by sexual problems. The people are pure at heart and in the stories their simplicity and purity appear most beautifully.

      In these tales and legends we have syncretism in full swing. It is not a picture of the past which we have to piece laboriously together from half-forgotten records, from writing half obliterated by the action of time and by changes which have swept over those nations of the past, whose life and thought we are endeavouring to conjure up and to understand. In our midst, at our door, under our own eyes, this process of mixing and adjusting, of change and evolution, of differentiation, combination and assimilation is still going on. It is a wonderful picture for any one who is able to discover the forces that are at work, who can trace every strand of the webbing, every thread in the woof and warp, to its immediate and to its remoter source. We see the shuttle of human imagination, of human belief, flying busily through the loom, charged at one time with one thread, at another with a different one. Many of the ways of the human mind meet here, cross one another, and new roads are thus created by busy wayfarers. And thus paganism sustains a busy and robust life. The old Pantheon is still peopled with the old gods, or, shall we better say, the Pandaemonium in its highest and best sense is displaying itself with unexpected vigour. The heathen gods, the Christian saints, God and the devil legends, fairy tales, oriental imagery, mystical traditions and astrological lore are all inextricably blended together. The line of demarcation between man and animal has not been clearly drawn, or it has not yet been attempted. These multifarious elements have not yet been combined into one homogeneous structure. The problem arises whether other nations have also passed through a similar mental and psychical process; whether they have had a similar Pandaemonic mixture, out of which their more colourless folk-lore had been distilled in the crucible of “civilization.”

      Primitive people can often hear the footfall of men by putting the ear to the ground. We may, by putting an ear to the ground, hear the footfalls of the Past, and listen to the echo before it dies away into eternity.