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                         THE GOLDEN MAIDEN and
                       other folk tales and fairy
                        stories told in Armenia

                            A. G. SEKLEMIAN

                              Introduction
                         Alice Stone Blackwell

                            Initial Letters
                              Ella Dolbear

                              Cover Design
                            Elizabeth Geary


                       The Helman-Taylor Company
                         Cleveland and New York
                                  1898







INTRODUCTION.


A distinguished English student of folk-lore has written:
"Armenia offers a rich and hitherto almost untouched field to the
folk-lorist, the difficulty of grappling with the language--the
alphabet even of which was described by Byron as 'a very Waterloo of
an alphabet'--having hitherto baffled European collectors."

So far as I can learn, the two volumes of Armenian folk-tales collected
by Bishop Sirwantzdiants have hitherto been accessible to English
and European readers only through the medium of a rare and more or
less imperfect German translation. The late Ohannes Chatschumian