Popular Tales from the Norse. By Sir George Dasent. (David
Douglas. 10s. 6d.)—This new edition of a classic has a Memoir of Sir G. Dasent by his son, Mr. Arthur Dasent, who tells simply the story of his father's life. Born in the West Indies, Sir George in 1840 became Secretary to the British Envoy to the Court of Sweden. It was at Stockholm that he learnt Norse, and learnt also to love the old literature of the North, and one result of this love was the translation of the folk-tales collected by Moe and Asbjornsen. So sympathetically was this accomplished that the stories seem as we read them as if they could not have existed otherwise. A feature of the collection is the masterly introduc- tion, giving a survey of the whole of Northern mythology and literature. We know of no other work of its kind that forms so good an introduction to the study of the wonderful poetry of the older Edda. We wish that Sir George's translation of the younger prose Edda could have been included in the present volume.
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