Note 4 — INTRODUCTION

The great majority of the folk-tales collected by me, and almost the whole of those given in this volume, come from districts of the far interior of the island, where story-books in Sinhalese, Tamil,4 or Arabic do not appear to have penetrated, and English is unknown by the villagers. Such tales are therefore nearly free from modern extraneous influences, and must be looked upon as often of genuine Sinhalese origin, even when they utilise the usual stock incidents of Indian folk-stories. A very few which resemble Jātaka stories may owe their dissemination to Buddhist teaching, and doubtless some also were orally transmitted by immigrants who were often of South Indian nationality—as their similarity to South Indian stories shows—or in some instances may have been settlers from the Ganges valley, or near it.