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Gypsy folk-tales

Chapter 32: Dr. Barbu Constantinescu.
By Francis Hindes Groome
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Mythology, Legends & Folklore

About This Book

A collection of traditional Romani tales assembled with ethnographic and philological commentary, featuring wonder-tales, origin myths, animal fables, trickster episodes, and stories of magic, curses, and divination. The editor provides a substantial introduction on sources and language, comparative folklore parallels, and notes on variant readings, and annotates individual narratives with cultural and textual observations. The work records regional versions and storytelling forms while linking the material to broader folk traditions and discussing linguistic and ethnological details.

[Contents]

Dr. Barbu Constantinescu.

Probe de Limba si Literatura Tiganilor din România, by Dr. Barbu Constantinescu (Bucharest, 1878; 112 pp.), is an admirable [liii]collection of seventy-five Roumanian-Gypsy songs and thirteen folk-tales, in the original Rómani, with a Roumanian translation. The thirteen tales were got from thirteen different Gypsies, and naturally they vary in merit, the best to my thinking being ‘The Red King and the Witch,’ ‘The Vampire,’ and ‘The Prince and the Wizard.’ I have given eleven of them, with full annotations; of ‘The Stolen Ox’ and ‘The Prince who ate Men’ there are summaries on pp. 66 and 219. Dr. Barbu Constantinescu, who was latterly a professor at Crajova, is, I learn, dead; he must have known Rómani thoroughly, and may have left large collections.