the same story although told in one form to a group of children and in another form to a group of soldiers. The audience that I hope particularly to interest is the English-speaking child.
Some few of the stories—such as Nemcova’s very beautiful Twelve Months and Erben’s spirited Zlatovlaska and to a less degree Nemcova’s hero tale, Vitazko—are already in such definitive form that it would be profanation to “edit” them. They—especially the first two—have been told once and for all. But the same cannot be said of most of the other stories. Nemcova’s renderings are too often diffuse and inconsequential, Kulda’s dry, pedantic, and homiletic. Erben, the scholarly old archivist of Prague, seems to me the greatest literary artist of them all. His chief interest in folklore was philological, but he was a poet as well as a scholar and he carried his versions of the old stories from the realm of crude folklore to the realm of art.
A small number of the present tales have appeared in earlier English collections coming, nearly always, by way of German or French translations. In the one case they have been squeezed dry of their Slavic exuberance and in the other somewhat dandified. So I make no apology for offering them afresh.
