Introduction
to Hungarian-Slovenish Stories

THE Slovenes or Slovaks of North Hungary speak a great number of dialects, their literary language being, however, the Bohemian. They seem to be the débris of a much larger nation or assemblage of nations, which was forced out of the plains of Pannonia into the mountains by the invasion of the Magyar or Hungarian horsemen, who, according to the Russian chronicler Nestor, marched past Kief in A.D. 898, on their way to establish themselves in their present abode.

Their stories are not very dissimilar to the Bohemian tales, although they do not resemble them so closely as the Moravian stories do. No. 10 is one of the tales that especially attracted my attention, and caused me to entertain the idea of translating a considerable selection out of the hundred given by Erben. No. 11 contains incidents which occur again in the White Russian story (No. 22), and in the great Russian tale of 'Ivan Popyalof,' given by Ralston, though in other respects the stories are very different. No. 22 is a superior variant of the German 'Rumpelstilskin' given by Grimm, and No. 13 is a specimen of an entirely different kind of story, illustrating 'The biter bitten.'

The text came from:

Wratislaw, A. H. Sixty Folk-Tales From Exclusively Slavonic Sources. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Company, 1890.

©Heidi Anne Heiner, SurLaLune Fairy Tales
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