1 Kláka. ‘Claca,’ says Grenville Murray, ‘signifies a species of assembly very popular in Wallachia. If any family has some particular work to do on any particular account, they invite the neighbourhood to come and work for them. When the work is completed there is high glee, singing and dancing, and story-telling.’—Doine; or, Songs and Legends of Roumania (Lond. 1854), p. 109 n. ↑
2 In Wlislocki, p. 104 note, the devil has a duck’s foot. In F. A. Steel’s Indian Wide-awake Stories, p. 54, the hero detects a ghost by her feet being set on hind part before. ↑
3 On p. 110 Dr. Barbu Constantinescu gives a long and terrific formula for bewitching with the evil eye. ↑
4 The notion of a dead girl turning into a flower is very common in Indian folk-tales. Cf. Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales, pp. 145, 149, 244, 247, 248, 252, etc.; and Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days, No. 6, ‘Little Surya Bai,’ pp. 79–93. ↑
5 Dá pes pe sherésti, lit. gave, or threw, herself on her head. In Gypsy stories this undignified proceeding almost invariably precedes every transformation. Cf. [17]‘The Red King and the Witch,’ ‘The Snake who became the King’s Son-in-law,’ ‘Tropsyn,’ etc. ↑
6 For golden boy cf. Dr. Barbu Constantinescu’s own ‘The Golden Children,’ No. 18, also Hahn, ii. 293. The two apples seem to be birth-marks. ↑
7 For the bursting of monsters, cf. Dasent’s Tales from the Norse, pp. 27, 240; and Ralston, p. 130. ↑
8 Our queen’s great-great-great-grandfather, George I., was a firm believer in the vampire superstition (Horace Walpole’s Letters, vol. i. p. cix.). ↑
14 So I had written; but I have since read Maive Stokes’ story of ‘The Demon conquered by the King’s Son’ (Indian Fairy Tales, No. 24, pp. 173 and 288). Here it is the demon step-mother, who, pretending her eyes are bad, sends the hero to fetch tigress’s milk, an eagle’s feather, night-growing rice and water from the Glittering Well. He speaks, however, of her as his ‘mother.’ e.g. on p. 180. Compare ‘The Son of Seven Mothers’ in F. A. Steel’s Indian Wide-awake Stories, pp. 98–110, and Knowles’ Folk-tales of Kashmir, pp. 1 and 42. ↑
18 Clearly Mr. Mayhew was no folklorist. The boy’s claim to have invented the story is worth noting. ↑
19 The Roumanian-Gypsy word is Baht, which in one form or another (bakht, bahi, bok, bachí, etc.) occurs in every Gypsy dialect—Turkish, Russian, Scandinavian, German, English, Spanish, etc., and which Pott derives from the Sanskrit (ii. 398–9). But the curious point is that in Dozon’s Contes Albanais (1881), p. 60, we get ‘Va trouver ma Fortune,’ and a footnote explains, ‘Fortune, en turc bakht, espèce de génie protecteur.’ Paspati, again, in his Turkish-Gypsy vocabulary (1870), p. 155, gives—‘Bakht, n.f. fortune, sort, hasard.… Les Grecs et les Turcs se servent très souvent du même mot’; and Miklosich, too, cites the Modern Greek μπάκτι (Ueber die Mundarten, vii. 14). The occurrence of this Gypsy word as a loan-word in Modern Greek and Turkish is suggestive of a profound influence of the Gypsies on the folklore of the Balkan Peninsula. Bakht, fortune, is also good Persian. ↑
20 This is a little puzzling, but it must mean that all the speeches seemingly by the princess were really made by the watchmaker—that he maintained the dialogue. ↑