The ocean of story, being C.H. Tawney's translation of Somadeva's ...

FOREWORD xxvii
Mr Penzer as his model in the care and trouble taken in
the laborious task of indexing his material. There are few
literary labours more tiresome to execute, but there is none
more useful in a work of learning. What the lack of an index
means in wasted hours and often fruitless racking of the
memory, others who have reason to lament the long delay
in the issue of Bolte and Polivka's fourth volume will know
by bitter experience.
But if the utility of a work of reference is largely discounted
by the absence of this most necessary aid to its use,
the same principle holds good of our studies as a whole.
Work which is not made accessible is work wasted. Now in
classical studies we are no doubt exceptionally fortunate in
the self-sacrificing trouble which is taken to provide us, not
only with dictionaries of various kinds, but also with periodical
surveys of what is being done in the many various
special fields. For example, it is not very difficult for the
historian to keep himself adequately abreast of the general
progress of archaeological research, and, this is the real point,
it is made easy for him to find out where to look for the details
of any particular discovery or special technical discussion,
which may throw light upon problems of his own. With
regard to folk-tales, however, a similar co-ordination of
labour is almost wholly to seek. A cynic declared of some
branches of the Intelligence Services of the Allies in the late
war that their only really successful efforts in maintaining
secrecy were shown in the prevention of any information
which they had acquired from reaching any rival branch
until it was too late to be of use ;
the situation with regard
to the study of folk-tales is not wholly dissimilar. We have
now, it is true, the valuable periodical summary of publications
by Otto Weinreich in the Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft
; but in this country little if anything is done in this
direction, and even the number of foreign books which are
sent for review to Folk-Lore is lamentably less than it ought
to be. It has certainly been my own experience that one
learns too often only by accident of major works of real
importance.
In particular I should like to take this opportunity to