t few extracts. It may, however,
be as well to say a few words about them. There is a Russian word
_lub_, diminutive _lubok_, meaning the soft bark of the lime tree,
which at one time was used instead of paper. The popular tales which
were current in former days were at first printed on sheets or strips
of this substance, whence the term _lubochnuiya_ came to be given to
all such productions of the cheap press, even after paper had taken
the place of bark.[1]

The stories which have thus been preserved have no small interest of
their own, but they cannot be considered as fair illustrations of
Russian folk-lore, for their compilers in many cases took them from
any sources to which they had access, whether eastern or western,
merely adapting what they borrowed to Russian forms of thought and
speech. Through some such process, for instance, seem to have passed
the very popular Russian stories of Eruslan Lazarevich and of Bova
Korolevich. They have often been quoted as "creations of the Slavonic
mind," but there seems to be no reason for doubting that they are
merely Russian adaptations, the first of the adventures of the Persian
Rustem, the second of those of the Italian Buovo di Antona, our Sir
Bevis of Hampton. The editors of these "chap-book skazkas" belonged to
the pre-scientific period, and had a purely commercial object in view.
Their stories were intended simply to sell.

A German version of seventeen of these "chap-book tales," to which
was prefixed an introduction by Jacob Grimm, was published some forty
years ago,[2] and has been translated into English.[3] Somewhat later,
also, appeared a German version of twelve more of these tales.[4]

Of late years several articles have appeared in some of the German
periodicals,[5] giving accounts or translations of some of the Russian
Popular Tales. But no thorough investigation of them appeared in
print, out of Russia, until the publication last year of the erudite
work on "Zoological Mythology" by Professor Angelo de Gubernatis. In
it he has given a summary of the greater part of the stories contained
in the collections of Afanasief and Erlenvein, and so fully has he
described the part played in them by the members of the animal world
that I have omitted, in the present volume, the chapter I had prepared
on the Russian "Beast-Epos."

Another chapter which I have, at least for a time, suppressed, is
that in which I had attempted to say something about the origin and
t