k tales
collected by Erben, Nemcova, Kulda, Dobsinsky, Rimavsky,
Benes-Trebizsky, Miksicek. I got them first by word of mouth and
afterwards hunted them out in the old books. My work has been that of
retelling rather than translating since in most cases I have put myself
in the place of a storyteller who knows several forms of the same story,
equally authentic, and from them all fashions a version of his own. It
is of course always 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.

Variants of most of the tales are, of course, to be found in other
countries. Grimm's _The White Snake_, for instance, is a variant of
_Zlatovlaska_. My rule of selection has been to take stories that do not
have well-known variants in other languages. I have to confess that _The
White Snake_ is very well known, but here I break my own rule on account
of the greater beauty of the Slavic version.

In Grimm there are also to be found variants of _A Gullible World (The
Shrewd Farmer)_, _The Devil's Little Brother-in-Law (Bearskin)_, _Clever
Manka (The Peasant's Clever Daughter)_, _The Devil's Gifts (The Magic
Gifts)_, _The Candles of Life (The Strange Godfather and Godfather
Death)_, _The Shoemaker's Apron (Brother Jolly)_. In all these tales the
same incidents are p