The characters which figure in Caucasian popular tales are very numerous, and are taken, as might be expected, from a great variety of sources. There are the stereotyped three brothers of German and Russian stories; the dragons, giants, were-wolves, wicked magicians, and beautiful girls married to bears, of all Aryan folk-lore; and sundry nondescript personages with superhuman powers which have no exact analogues among the other Aryan races, and seem to be original products of Caucasian fancy. Among the latter are _karts_, female ogres with cannibalistic tastes; _narts_, or giants of protean shapes and variable dispositions; and certain mysterious equestrians who are always described as "hare-riders." These three classes of supernatural beings, karts, narts and hare-riders, are known to the whole body of the Caucasian mountaineers without distinction of tribe or race; and it is a significant fact that the two first mentioned have everywhere and in all Caucasian languages the same names. By whom they were originally invented, and from what tongue their appellations were derived, philologists can as yet only conjecture. Among the Ossetes, who are unquestionably an Aryan race, narts have a quasi-historical existence like the Knights of the Round Table, and their lives and adventures have been woven by popular tradition into a sort of mediæval epic resembling the _Nibelungen Lied_ of Germany. Elsewhere, among the Chechenses, the Avars and the Circassians, narts are simply giants of the orthodox nursery type. It is remarkable that we should also find among the _dramatis personæ_ of Caucasian popular tales such Old-Testament heroes as Jonah and Solomon, and such historical characters as the Roman Cæsars. The former were very likely introduced by the Jews and Arabs, whose descendants form no inconsiderable part of the present population, but the Roman emperors must have gained a foothold in Caucasian traditional lore before the downfall of the Byzantine Empire, and may have done so as long ago as the reign of Augustus, when the lowlands of the Caucasus were under Roman rule.