Professor G. Vernadsky, well-known as an historian of ancient Russia, recently published an Ossetic folktale, which he had obtained from a Mr. Dzambulat Dzanty, an Ossete by birth, who in his turn stated that he had heard it (and written it down) in his youth, ‘in the village of Great Iron (Bolshoe OsetinsJcoe) at the time of hay-making (xosgärdän), June, 1910’, from an ‘old white-bearded man’ by name of Khulyx [] ‘The
Lame One’, who ‘was a poet himself and in some of his own works followed the pattern of the old Ossetian oral traditions’. As the old gentleman was ‘over seventy in 1910’, we cannot hope to consult him now about his sources or about the numerous strange words and expressions in the text presented, after an interval of 45 years, by Mr. Dzambulat Dzanty.