Sagas from the Far East; or, Kamouk and Mongolian Traditionary Tales
Various
9781465554215
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The origin and migrations of myths have of late been the subject of so much sifting and study, the elaborate results of which are already before the world, that there is no need in this place to offer more than a few condensed remarks in allusion to the particular collections now, I believe, for the first time put into English. Translations of some chapters of the “Adventures of the Well-and-wise-walking Khan” have been made by Benj. Bergmann, Riga, 1804; by Golstunski, St. Petersburg, 1864; and by H. Osterley, in 1867. Of “Ardschi-Bordschi,” by Emil Schlaginweit; by Benfey, in “Ausland,” Nos. 34–36, and the whole of both by Professor Jülg, 1865–68; of these I have availed myself in preparing the following pages; I know of no other translation into any European language except one into Russ by Galsan Gombojew, published at S. Petersburg in 1865–681. The first thirteen chapters of the “Well-and-wise-walking Khan” are a Kalmouk1 collection, all the rest Mongolian; and though traceable to Indian sources, they yet have received an entire transformation in the course of their adoption by their new country. In giving them another new home, some further alterations, though of a different nature, have been necessary. However much one may regret them such transformations are inevitable. It seems a law of nature that history should to a certain extent write itself. We know the age of a tree by its knots and rings; and we trace the age of a building by its alterations and repairs—and that equally well whether these be made in a style later prevailing, utterly different from that of the original design, or in the most careful imitation of the same; for the age of the workman’s hand cannot choose but write itself on whatever he chisels. It is just the same with these myths. They cannot remain as if stereotyped from the first; the hand that passes them on must mould them anew in the process. You might say, they have been already altered enough during their wanderings, give them to us now at least as the Mongolians left them. But it is not possible, most of them are too coarse to meet an eye trained by Christianity and modern cultivation. The habit of mind in which they are framed is in places as foreign as the idiom in which they are written; I have, however, made it an undeviating rule to let such alterations be as few and as slight as the case admitted, and that they should go no farther than was necessary to make them readable, or occasionally give them point. As I have said these stories have an ‘Indian’ source, it becomes incumbent to spend a few lines on defining the use and reach of the word2
