_WHITE RUSSIAN STORIES._
We now come to the first set of stories belonging to those
Slavonians who make use of the Cyrillic instead of the Latin
characters. The White Russians occupy the whole of the Governments
of Minsk and Mogilef, and great part of those of Vitebsk and Grodno.
In these stories we first met with the distinction between the
Western and Eastern Slavonic terms for monarch. The Western
Slavonians employ the terms _kral_, _krul_, or _korol_, for a
monarch, which are believed to originate from the name of the mighty
Frankish monarch, KARL the Great, whom we generally know by his
French title, Charlemagne. The Eastern Slavonians usually make use
of the term TZAR, 'Emperor,' which is a corruption of the Latin
'Cæsar,' the title of the emperors of Constantinople, and later of
the Russian emperors. Thus in the following stories we shall find
emperors and empresses generally, though not invariably, replacing
kings and queens, till we return again to the West.
The White Russian language possesses but little literature, but was
employed for diplomatic purposes by the once powerful state of
Lithuania (Morfill's 'Slavonic Literature,' S.P.C.K., p. 113).
The heroes 'Overturn-hill' (_Vertogor_) and 'Overturn-oak'
(_Vertodub_), who appear in No. 22, occur also in a story from the
Ukraine, given by Mr. Ralston (pp. 170-175). Several circumstances
in No. 22 are also similar to incidents in the Russian tale of 'Ivan
Popyalof' (Ralston, p. 66), but in spite of these similarities the
stories are truly distinct.