[Gutenberg 46944] • The Golden Maiden, and other folk tales and fairy stories told in Armenia

THE STORY-TELLER TO HIS AUDIENCE. If I were telling my stories to an audience composed of Armenians, as I told them years ago, I would begin without any preliminary remarks or introduction. But since the audience is made up of people who are comparatively unacquainted with my native land and its traditions, naturally they will like to know who the story-teller is, where he got his narratives, and by whom and how his tales were first told. About twenty years ago I was a boy living in a village on the heights of the Taurus Mountains in Cilicia, or Lesser Armenia, not far from the Mediterranean Sea. Like boys and girls all over the world, I was very fond of stories; but there were no story-books or other reading matter with which I and other children of my age could gratify our eager desire for stories. But better than these were the aged folks who told us all the interesting stories which our inquisitive childhood required. I had two grandmothers and half a dozen aunts, all unlettered country people, who took great delight in a rich store of folk-lore and fairy tales, and who told me the most entertaining and delightful stories that I have ever heard. In every village home there were one or two such old people, who entertained the youth of their respective homes. During the long winter evenings we boys and girls gathered together around the village hearth to listen to the old man or aged woman rehearsing tales of fairies, giants, genii, dragons, knights, winged beauties, captive maidens, and other thousand and onemysterious beings. I need not say how, with utmost interest, our youthful minds used to follow the details of these vivid and picturesque stories, drinking in every word with the greatest avidity. This was true not only of children but of grown-up people also, whose principal pastime, during the long and tedious winter nights, was the rehearsing of folk-tales and fairy stories, or listening to others as they told them. These circumstances gave me opportunity and power to commit to memory a great number of tales and rehearse them whenever there was a favorable occasion. By this means I improved and increased my store of tales so much that I became quite a noted story-teller in our village, at a time when I was but a mere lad. Subsequently, both during my college course in Aintab, Cilicia, and during the period when I was a teacher in Erzroom, of Armenia proper, I had the opportunity to travel a great deal and to study the life and manners of the Armenians in their primitive homes. I found the same fairy stories and folk-tales current everywhere, with such slight differences only as the people made when appropriating the tales to their own surroundings and to their fund of knowledge. At that time it occurred to my mind that it would be a good plan to make a collection of these tales in order to make use of them some day, and so I kept notes of the tales just as they were told by the common, unlettered country people. Bishop Sirwantzdiants, an Armenian clergyman, also made a collection of Armenian folk-tales, taking them from the mouth of the people just as they were told. He published his collection in two separate books. The first, "Manana" (Manna), was printed in Constantinople in 1876 by the Dindessian Printing-press (since closed), and the second, "Hamov-Hodov" (Delicious and Fragrant), was printed in Constantinople in 1884 by the Bagdadlian Printing-press. My personal notes of Armenian tales and these two books of Bishop Sirwantzdiants have furnished the material of the present volume. As the Bishop and myself made our collections independently in different districts of Armenia, our texts naturally differed from each other in some points. But the two being substantially the same, in putting the stories into English I have followed the one which I thought to be the most original, taking all the circumstances into consideration."