A close observer of English and Welsh gypsies, Francis Hindes Groome assembled seventy-six traditional tales from them and from a group of East European gypsies who came to the north of England in 1886. The tales belong to the Indo-European category of magical fictions, and include comparative end-notes written by Groome. In a seventy-four page introduction he developed his diffusionist theory of the gypsies as carriers of folk tales from India to Persia and America, to the Balkan Peninsula and thence to western Europe. What others saw as survivals in German peasant tales Groome perceived as...
A close observer of English and Welsh gypsies, Francis Hindes Groome assembled seventy-six traditional tales from them and from a group of East Europe...
