Ralston, William Ralston Shedden
Ralston, William Ralston Shedden (1828–89),English translator and specialist in Russian folklore, librarian and scholar with the British Museum, and founding member of the Folk‐Lore Society. Modelled on Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1835), Ralston's first compilation, The Songs of the Russian People, as Illustrative of Slavic Mythology and Russian Social Life (1872), is an attempt to reconstruct from peasant tradition the mythological underpinnings of Slavic folklore. Russian Folk‐Tales (1873), consisting of tales mainly from Aleksandr Afanasyev's collections, again reflects Ralston's interest in the relation between mythology and folk and fairy tales. Ralston also wrote introductions to Indian Fairy Tales (1880 edn.), Portuguese Folk‐Tales (1882), and Tibetan Tales (1882) in which he proves to be a rigorous comparatist...
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