Gypsy folk-tales

Chapter 35: Dr. R. von Sowa.

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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. R. von Sowa.

Die Mundart der Slovakischen Zigeuner (Göttingen, 1887), by Dr. Rudolf von Sowa, of Brünn, is based on nineteen Slovak-Gypsy stories which he collected at Teplicz in 1884–85, and nine of which are given in the original Rómani without a translation. Dr. von Sowa also contributed four Gypsy folk-tales—Slovak and Moravian—to the Gypsy Lore Journal; and the Bohemian-Gypsy story of ‘The Three Dragons’ he sent me in manuscript. His stories have a high value for the purposes of comparison, but are inferior as stories to those of several other collections. I have given eight of them—Nos. 12, 19, 22, 41, 42, 43, 44, 60.