On the problem of the quotations in Samuel Reuss’ commentaries on his Codexy revúcke

Samuel Reuss, a precursor of modern Slovak ethnography from the first half of the 19th c., collected numerous Slovak folk tales on which he wrote detailed commentaries in German. They include numerous quotations from various sources, e.g. Classics, historiographical and geographical works etc. thus proving Reuss’ tremendous encyclopedic knowledge. Both folk tales and commentaries are contained in three hitherto unpublished manuscripts known as Codexy revúcke. The present article examines Reuss’ quotations from the point of view of their critical edition and differentiates between three categories: 1) quotations whose sources are correctly mentioned; 2) correct quotations but with incorrect reference to their sources: 3) paraphrases of sources. The article discusses possibilities of identifying the sources from which Reuss quoted and suggests possible solutions to presenting the quotations in a critical edition.