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Folk - Lore
A QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF
MYTH, TRADITION, INSTITUTION, & CUSTOM.
[Incorporating The Archaeological Review and The Folk-Lore Journal.]
VOL. III.— 1892.
LONDON : DAVID NUTT, 270, STRAND.
LONDON : CHAS. J. CLARK, 4, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, W.C.
R
1
CONTENTS.
I. — (March 1892.)
PAGE
Opening Address to the Folk-Lore Society for the Session
1891-92. G. L. GOMME - - - - I
The Lai of Eliduc and the Marchen of Little Snow- White.
Alfred Nutt - - - - - 26
Magic Songs of the Finns, IV. Hon. JOHN Abercromby - 49
Guardian Spirits of Wells and Lochs. Rev. Walter Gregor 67
Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions, II. Prof John Rhys - 74
Discussion - - - - - - 88
Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa. Rev. D. Elmslie - 92 Report on Folk-tale Research, 1890-91. E. Sidney Hart- land - - - - - - III
Folk-Lore Society. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Council 130
II.— (June 1892.)
The Sin-Eater. E Sidney Hartland - - - 145
Samoan Tales, II. Hon. John Abercromby - - 158 German Christmas and the Christmas-Tree. Dr. Alexander
TiLLE - - - - - - 166
The Baker of Beauly : a Highland version of the Tale of the
" Three Precepts". Alex. MacBain and W. A. Clouston 183 Divination among the Malagasy, together with Native Ideas as
to Fate and Destiny. Rev. Jas. Sibree - - 193
The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Mrs. Eliza GUTCH - - 227 " First Foot" in the British Isles. Prof John Rhys and
T. W. E. Higgens - - - - 253
Folk-Lore Society. Proceedings at Evening Meetings - 272
III. — (September 1892.)
Queries as to Dr. Tylor's Views on Animism. J. S. Stuart-
Glennie ..... 289
An Analysis of Certain Finnish Myths of Origin. Hon. JOHN
Abercromby ..... 308
Bantu Customs and Legends. Rev. JAINIES Macdonald - 337
Importance du Folk-lore pour les Etudes de I'Ancien Fran^ais.
M. Wilmotte . . . - - 360
iv Contents.
Folk-lore Miscellanea. Prof. John Rhys - - - 375
Celtic Myth and Saga. Report upon the Progress of Research
during the past two years. Alfred Nutt - - 387
IV. — (December 1892.)
The Easter Hare. Chas. J. BiLLSON - - - 441
The Bodleian Dinnshenchas. Edited and translated by
Whitley Stokes .... 467
Index to Places - - - - - 516
Balochi Tales, I. M. Longworth Dames - - 5 '7
Recent Greek Archeology in its relation to Folk-lore. Cecil
Smith --..-. 529 Title-page and Contents for Vol. III.
Notes and News - - - 139, 270, 433, 554
Review : Paul's Grundriss. Alfred Nutt - - 425 Correspondence :
Chained Images, Miss G. M. Godden - - - 137 The Widow's Son ; and Greek Folk-lore, Miss L. M.
Garnett ..... 265
Ethnologists and Anthropologists, J. S. Stuart-Glennie - 267
Branchos, A. E. Crawley - - - - 267
The Buck's Leap, Miss C. S. Burne - - - 427
The Flat-foot Question, Karl Blind - - - 429
Chained Images, E. S. Hartland - - - 546 Mr. Hartland's " Sin-Eater", and Primitive Sacraments,
Miss G. M. Godden - - - - 546
Christmas Mummers, T. F. Ordish ... 550 Folk-Songs and Music, Miss L. E. Broadwood - "551
Errata in the September Number - - - 553
Miscellanea :
Churn Charm, and Sympathetic Bees, Alfred Nutt - 138
Exorcism in Wales, GRIFFITH Evans - - - 274
The Three Precepts : a Norse Variant, W. A. Clouston - 556
Folk-lore from South-East Suffolk, Lady Camilla Gurdon 558
Folk-lore Bibliography - - 141, 278, 435, 561
Indexes : Articles — Bibliography - - - 569
jfolk^Xore.
Vol. III.] MARCH, 1892. [No. I.
THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS.
I BELIEVE the remark has been made on other occa- sions, by other Presidents, that the Society might have done much better by electing some one more fitted to fill the post than the individual chosen. Other Presidents in other Societies, and in this Society, have disproved their own assertion by the benefits they have conferred upon the bodies who elected them ; and I certainly must pause to observe that under our late President this Society gained a distinction and a place which even in the courtly hands of Earl Beauchamp and the friendly hands of the Earl of Verulam it had not previously obtained. I think Mr. Lang's services cannot be counted by the number of times he attended the meetings, the practical assistance he rendered in organisation, or the addresses with which he favoured the Society. It is by Mr. Lang's place in litera- ture and science that we must measure his services to the Society, and in my judgment they cannot be overrated.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is difficult to follow such a man, even at a distance. All the qualifications I can bring for the post are what I will term internal qualifications — an intimate knowledge of the Society's affairs, an intense love and enthusiasm for the subject it deals with, a strong desire to see that subject dealt with adequately and com- pletely upon scientific grounds, and upon scientific grounds only. I am supported by loyal and kindly colleagues —
VOL. in. B
2 The Pi^esident- s Address.
men who know more of folk-lore than I do, men who are as eager votaries in its cause as I am— and with such support I do not for an instant doubt that we may look to a successful year which shall stamp the Society as one of the hardest working of the learned bodies. This you must please accept as the key-note of my policy as President ; so that by replacing a brilliant President by a working President, who could not be brilliant if he tried, and who is not going to try, you must expect from him only what the change implies — namely, work.
For there is so much to do — much to do, I mean, in a solid, practical way to convince a solid, practical kind of world. I will not weary you with a long catalogue of all there is to do ; but I can at least indicate the main outlines of what appears to me to be absolutely necessary to our present position as a Society. I would arrange the several departments of our working organisation in somewhat the following manner : —
1. The bringing to light of all the hidden items of folk- lore contained in sermons, chronicles, local histories, old newspapers, parliamentary blue-books, legal records, crimi- nal trials, etc. All this should be brought into the archives of the Society by first of all being reprinted in handy form in the exact words of the original, without note or comment. It forms our first platform,
2. The completion of the English bibliography of folk- lore, so that all books devoted to folk-lore subjects may be duly recorded in our archives and the particular subjects treated of by them placed before the student, would form our second platform.
3. The collection of all that remains yet uncollected in each county of the kingdom would form our third platform.
Then comes the sifting, arranging, and docketing of each separate folk-lore item brought together from these three sources, so that all its phases may be before the student — its earliest chronological mention, its most primi- tive forms, the changes of form in the secondary or later
The President s Addi'ess. 3
derivative stages, the geographical distribution of the various forms. Finally, there is the arrangement of each item in relationship to all other items — the formation, as I have before now called it, of the ancient mosaics of folk- lore.
With such a museum as this to put before the student- world commentary and discussion could at last be com- menced based upon something like a solid foundation, with ample means of checking conclusions and forming theory after theory, theory built upon theory, if need be, because the original foundation is fact.
All this, however, involves and implies that the work of oral collection is one of the most important of our imme- diate duties. We must get it in hand and waiting for the printer to make it accessible to all. So long ago as 1852 a suggestion was quoted from the Morning CJironick into the pages oi Notes and Qnertes, founded by our founder, Mr.W. J. Thorns, which is valuable even now : — ''Two young Finnish students are wandering through the districts round Tammer- fors, for the purpose of collecting and preserving old Finnish folk-tales, legends, songs, rimes, etc. Their names are B. Paldani and O. Palander .... why do we not follow their example? When will some of our accomplished young scholars wander over the hills and dales of Merry England rescuing from oblivion our rich traditions before they pass for ever from among us ? Surely the Society of Anti- quaries might arrange similar visits for a similar purpose. There is no want of men able and willing to undertake the task, only the arranging-hand is wanting. In the mean- time, let every man do what he can in his own neighbour- hood." And the "noter" of this interesting paragraph, Mr. C. D. Lamont of Greenock, expressed his willingness to ■ aid the cause by contributing to its expenses.
At last I can quote this with some satisfaction. I have had it before me for some time, but only now can I say ^hat the " arranging-hand" or hands, the men and women able and willing to undertake the work, and the contribu-
t. 2
4 The President's Address,
tors towards the expense, all come from our own Society ; for a member of our Council, whom I am not at liberty to name, expressed to me, not many weeks since, his desire to assist by substantial money-aid exactly the same plan that Mr. Lamont urged forty years ago.
But although none of the work of folk-lore has been accomplished in the systematic manner which I have just sketched, much of what has been done falls in a natural sort of way into the ideal plan now proposed — nay, it suggests the plan. And what has been accomplished is quite sufficient at all events to indicate to the student certain landmarks which are fairly well fixed, in spite of the different methods and different theories of folk-lorists ; and to these landmarks I would chiefly direct your atten- tion to-night.
Of course, we all approach our study with a kind of bias in favour of some particular view, and my own bias is pretty generally known. I believe that folk-lore supplies or the countries of Europe the anthropological data cor- responding to what is being collected so assiduously from people who are still in the savage and barbarous stage of culture. I believe that the sanction upon which folk-lore depends — namely, tradition — is diVera causa for its antiquity. I believe that everything that owes its existence to tradi- tion should be classed as folk-lore, whether belief, usage, or custom ; and that each of these sections should be studied not separately, as if they had no connection with each other, but together, as the results of one common cause in human history.
But with this bias it is easy to see that the first important landmark is the influence exerted on traditional belief and usage by Christianity. We see clearly enough that the heroes and heroines of our folk-tales are certainly not Christians, and Christianity is scarcely represented even nominally in tales, except those occurring in Slavonic countries and in Spain. But these exceptions can be accounted for, I think, by facts which at once pronounce
The President' s Address. 5
for non-Christian origins. In the meantime cannibalism, cruelty, revenge, magic, and other similar qualities, mark the characters of the traditional nidrcJien or folk-tale.
In custom and usage the evidence all points the same way. What can be more indicative of a dual system of belief than the cry of an old Scottish peasant when he came to worship at the sacred well? — "O Lord, thou knowest that well would it be for me this day an I had stoopit my knees and my heart before Thee in spirit and in truth as often as I have stoopit them afore this well. But we maun keep the customs of our fathers." And among the super- stitions of Lancashire is one which tells us of the lingering belief in a long journey after death, when food is necessary to support the soul. A man having died of apoplexy, near Manchester, at a public dinner, one of the company was heard to remark : " Well, poor Joe, God rest his soul ! He has at least gone to his long rest wi' a belly full o' good meat, and that 's some consolation."
Special attention is needed to the characteristic of tradi- tion which is not Christian, because there is an important factor to take count of on the other side, which, owing to some recent words of Dr. Tylor, is of some moment to us just now. It seems to be admitted that the influence of Christianity is here and there traceable among the tradi- tional elements of savage and barbaric life. Thus the era of Christianity becomes a very important dividing line in folk-lore studies. On the one hand we have tradition in Christian countries going back to paganism ; on the other hand we have tradition in pagan countries going back to Christianity ; and necessarily, when we attempt the task of comparison, such phenomena must be taken into serious consideration. But if we are careful not to ignore the influence of Christianity upon savage beliefs, so must we be careful not to unduly accentuate it. It would account no doubt for some of the colouring matter, so to speak, of savage myth, but it would go a very little way in explaining savage ritual and belief The important point
6 The President' s Address.
for us to bear in mind is that, in both Christian and savage countries, Christian influences, though great, are not abso- lutely absorbing — if paganism, in short, is still to be traced in Europe, we should be chary of admitting too much as due to Christian influences in savage countries, for we have not yet properly traced out the elements of Christianity in Europe that are due to non-Christian sources.
I do not intend to-night to touch upon the influence of Christianity upon savage tradition. I would rather turn your attention to the evidence of the survival of paganism in Europe ; for, though this has frequently been proved, it is well to bear the nature of the proofs in mind. That the Fathers of the early Church met with it, and recorded it, is to be expected, and it is one of the duties which this Society owes to the folk-lore student to collect together the passages from the patristic writings which relate to this epoch. Eusebius, St. Jerome, St. Columba, and the venerable Bede are among those who at once occur to the mind as bearing testimony to this part of our subject ; but the testimony wants a fair statement, and a complete collection of its constituent parts. When it is got to- gether, it will be found that the chronology of the evidence extends down far later than most of us are inclined to think. It was only in the 17th century that a learned divine of the Church of England was shocked to hear one of his flock repeat the evidence of his pagan beliefs in language which is explicit as it is amusing; and I shall not be accused of trifling with religious susceptibilities if I quote a passage from a sermon delivered and printed in 1659 — a passage which shows not a departure from Christianity either through ignorance or from the result of philosophic study or contemplation, but a sheer non- advance to Christianity, a passage which shows us an English pagan of the 17th century.
" Let me tell you a story," says the Reverend Mr. Pemble,. " that I have heard from a reverend man out of the pulpit, a place where none should dare to tell a lye, of an old man
The President' s Address. 7
above sixty, who lived and died in a parish where there had bin preaching almost all his time. . . . On his death- bed, being questioned by a minister touching his faith and hope in God, you would wonder to hear what answer he made : being demanded what he thought of God, he answers that he was a good old man ; and what of Christ, that he was a towardly youth ; and of his soule, that it was a great bone in his body ; and what should become of his soule after he was dead, that if he had done well he should be put into a pleasant green meadow."
Of the four articles of this singular creed, the first two depict an absence of knowledge about the central features of Christian belief, the latter two denote the existence of knowledge about some belief not known to English scholars of that time. If it had so happened that the Reverend Mr. Pemble had thought fit to tell his audience only of the two first articles of this creed, it would have been difficult to resist the suggestion that they presented us merely with an example of stupid, or, perhaps, impu- dent, blasphemy caused by the events of the day. But the negative nature of the first two items of the creed is counterbalanced by the positive nature of the second two items ; and thus this example shows us the importance of considering evidence as to all phases of non-belief in Christianity.
But I pass on to the two items of positive belief The soul resident in the body in the shape of a bone is no part of the primitive Aryan belief, but equates rather with the savage idea which identifies the soul with some material part of the body, such as the eyes, the heart, or the liver ; and it is interesting to note in this connection that the backbone is considered by some savage races, e.g., the New Zealanders, as especially sacred, because the soul or spiritual essence of man resided in the spinal mar- row (Shortland, 107). And there is a well-known incident in folk-tales which seems to owe its origin to this group of ideas. This is where the hero, having been killed, one of
8 The President'' s Address.
his bones tells the secret of his death, and thus acts the part of the soul-ghost.
In the pleasant green fields we trace the old faiths of the agricultural peasantry, which, put into the words of Hesiod, tell us that " for them earth yields her increase ; for them the oaks hold in their summits acorns, and in their midmost branches bees. The flocks bear for them their fleecy burdens .... they live in unchanged happiness, and need not fly across the sea in impious ships" — faiths which are in striking contrast to the Aryan warrior's conception as set forth by the Saxon thane of King Eadwine of Northumbria. "This life", said this poetical thane, " is like the passage of a bird from the darkness without into a lighted hall where you, O King, are seated at supper, while storms, and rain, and snow rage abroad. The sparrow flying in at our door and straightway out at another is, while within, safe from the storm ; but soon it vanishes into the darkness whence it came."
But I must not now linger over contrasts in belief What I am anxious to illustrate is that the beliefs of this pagan Englishman reveal to us an individual whose stage of cul- ture was due, not to the prevailing academic or religious teaching of his own time, but to the ideas and beliefs of a culture which had ceased to exist as a prevailing or recog- nised culture for eight or nine centuries. Having ascer- tained this much, what does it indicate to us further ? In the first place, such a belief, such a veritable stage of paganism, must have come down by tradition from pre- Christian times. It cannot well be that this Englishman had gone abroad, and meeting somewhere a tribe of uncivi- lised people, had overthrown what little religious teaching he might have received in the seventeenth century, and had deliberately adopted the religion of savages. It cannot well be, either, that some uncivilised belief had travelled to England, either by means of an individual holding such a belief, or of an individual relating to wondering peasants his knowledge of such a belief, and had by this means been
The President's Address. 9
sucked up into the life of this English peasant. And so we get to the fact that tradition is the sanction for the existence of this pagan Englishman of the seventeenth century. In the next place such a tradition must have been kept alive, not by means of one individual, one family, one small group of peasants, who signalised themselves by obstinately learning not to become Christians. It must have been kept alive by the agency of a considerable number of people ; and perhaps Shakespeare has preserved evidence of this when he puts into the mouth of Dame Quickly the information that Falstaff on his death -bed " babbled of green fields". And so we conclude that in this fortunate allusion in a seventeenth century sermon to the irreligious beliefs of one member of a Christian flock, we have one of those accidents of literature the discovery of which is as important for the study of man as a dis- covery in geology, in chemistry, is for those branches of natural science. But let me point this out. If such an accidental discovery proves so fruitful in good results it behoves us to tap the sources of such information more thoroughly, more scientifically ; and if any member of the Society under my presidency shows himself unduly restive or sceptical as to folk-lore methods, I shall set him to work to wade through all the dreary tomes of sermons which theologians have flung upon a book-ridden world.
When we folk-lorists, then, claim that certain legends or customs or beliefs are relics of a prehistoric culture, we have at least the support of actual fact to show that the culture of historic times has not penetrated everywhere among the people. With this fresh in your minds I want to draw attention to an Irish custom which in some respects is as curious and remarkable as anything I have come across in folk-lore.
At Lahinch, a small village at the bottom of the Bay of Liscannor, in Ireland, a remarkable summer ceremony took place about the year 1833. It was observed in two succes- sive years, and the details were on each occasion the same.
lo The President' s Address.
This fact is important, as unfortunately a minute descrip- tion has not been put on record. A crowd of men and boys walked for about a mile along the road which runs al%ng the bay. At their head were two middle-aged men, holding each by one of his hands a lad of about nineteen years of age perfectly naked, while immediately behind him was an elderly man (either his father or uncle, as it was afterwards found out) holding a hatchet and a saw. On reaching the bathing-place a circle was formed, and the principal performers were enclosed in it. After a time the young man was led out by another, who had undressed himself, and bathed in the sea, after which they were again received into the circle, when some ceremony was gone through in which the hatchet and saw were used, and in a {&\v moments a loud shout proclaimed that the mystery was proceeding successfully. As soon as the man who had bathed the boy was dressed, the crowd set forth into the village with loud shouts, the two men leading the naked youth as before, and the man with the saw and hatchet following. Nothing could be found out about the meaning of this extraordinary ceremony, and questions were not allowed to be asked about it. A sort of horror seemed to hang over everything until the bathing ceremony was completed, and everyone, particularly the women, seemed anxious to keep out of the line of procession, while the ceremony was strictly guarded from the observation of the "profane". As soon as it was over, all the rabble rout^ both male and female, of the village flocked about the performers, and for some time kept up loud shouts.
What is the meaning of this ceremony? Can we think of the nude figure as a victim or as a novitiate ? May we connect some of the incidents, notably the supposed secrecy and the absence of the townspeople, as parallel to some of the incidents in the Godiva ceremony which Mr. Hartland has examined for us } Or are we to think of it as a mere piece of modern foolery of more than question- able taste ?
The Preside7tfs Address. i r
I shall not to-night attempt to give the explanation I am inclined to hold is the correct one, but I put these prelimi- nary questions in order to ask the far more important one as to what we are to do with such specimens of folk-lore — a question which takes us in fact to the second great landmark in our studies, namely, the point where we may properly commence the work of comparison. Having picked out any item of folk-lore, are we immediately to rush off into foreign lands inhabited by barbarous and by savage people, seeking for analogues? My answer is decidedly not. We must first of all treat of them as sur- vivals in British folk-lore, and we must ascertain their place in British folk-lore, their relationship to other customs and beliefs extant among the same people or within the same geographical area.
Each folk-lore item, in point of fact, has a life-history of its own, and a history of its place in relationship to other items. Just as the biography of each separate word in our language has been investigated in order to get at Aryan speech as the interpretation of Aryan thought, so must the biography of each custom, superstition, or story be investi- gated in order to get at Aryan belief or something older than Aryan belief We must try to ascertain whether each item represents primitive belief by direct descent, by sym- bolisation, or by changes which may be discovered by some law equivalent to Grimm's law in the study of language. Patient research must be the method of the future, and we must leave off poetising about folk-lore, and commence to arrange it in statistical columns ; nay, there will be poetry in this even, for from such statistics may be recovered some of the lost ideals and aspirations of our prehistoric ancestors.
Such statistics will reveal some characteristics of folk- lore, which, so far as I know, have never yet been taken count of One very important characteristic is the pre- valence of a particular belief attached to different objects in different places. It will be in the recollection of those
12 The President's Address.
of you who heard Professor Rhys's paper on Manx folk-lore that he stopped short in his explanation of the superstition of the first-foot, because he had heard that, while in the Isle of Man it was attached to a dark man, elsewhere it was attached to a fair man. Of the examples where, on New Year's morning, it is held to be unlucky to meet a dark person, I may mention Lincolnshire, Durham, Yorkshire, and Northumberland. It is, on the contrary, lucky to meet, as first-foot, a dark-haired man in Lanca- shire, the Isle of Man, and Aberdeenshire. In these cases we get the element of "dark" or "fair" as the varying factor of the superstition ; but instances in Sutherlandshire, the West of Scotland, and in Durham occur, where the varying factor rests upon the question of sex — a man being lucky and a woman being unlucky.
Similarly of the well-known superstition about telling the bees of the death of their owner, in Berkshire, Bucks, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumberland, Lincolnshire, Lanca- shire, Monmouthshire, Notts, Northumberland, Shropshire, Somersetshire, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, Wilts, Worcester- shire, it appears that a relative may perform the ceremony, or sometimes a servant merely, while in Derbyshire, Hants, Northants, Rutland, and Yorkshire it must be the heir or successor of the deceased owner. Again, while in the above places the death of the owner is told to the bees, in other places it is told to the cattle ; and, in other places, marriages as well as death are told to the bees.
In some cases the transfer from one object to another of a particular superstition is a matter of absolute observa- tion. Thus, the labourers in Norfolk considered it a pre- sage of death to miss a " bout" in corn or seed sowing. The superstition is now transferred to the drill, which has only been invented during the present century. Again, in Ireland it is now considered unlucky to give anyone a light for his pipe on May-day — a very modern supersti- tion, apparently. But the pipe has been the means of pre-
The President'' s Address. 13
serving the older superstition of not giving a light from the homestead fire,
I will just touch upon one other subject dealt with by Professor Rhys during last session : I mean the well- known custom of offering rags at sacred wells. Professor Rhys thought that the object of these scraps of clothing being placed at the well was for the purpose of transferring the disease from the sick person to some one else. But I ventured to oppose this idea, and considered that they were offerings, pure and simple, to the spirit of the well. Since the discussion, which took place in December, I have turned to examples of the subject, and, among other items, I have come across an account of an Irish "station", as it is called, at a sacred well, the details of which fully bear out my view as to the nature of the rags deposited at the shrine being offerings to the local deity. One of the devotees, in true Irish fashion, made his offering accom- panied by the following words : " To St. Columbkill — I offer up this button, a bit o' the waistband o' my own breeches, an' a taste o' my wife's petticoat, in remimbrance of us havin' made this holy station ; an' may they rise up in glory to prove it for us in the last day." I shall not attempt to account for the presence of the usual Irish wit in this, to the devotee, most solemn offering ; but I point out the undoubted nature of the offerings and their service, in the identification of their owners — a service which im- plies their power to bear witness in spirit-land to the pil- grimage of those who deposited them during lifetime at the sacred well.
Now, in all these cases there is an original and a secondary, or derivative, form, of the superstition, and it is our object to trace out which is which, for it is only with the original form that we can properly deal with the com- parative side of folk-lore. Do the rags deposited at wells symbolise offerings to the local deity? If so, they bring us within measurable distance of a cult which rests upon faith in the power of natural objects to harm or render aid
14 The Presideiif s Address.
to human beings. Does the question of first-foot rest upon the colour of the hair or upon the sex of the person ? I think, looking at all the examples I have been able to examine, that colour is really the older basis of the super- stition, and, if so, ethnological considerations are doubtless the root of it. Again, if the eldest son of the deceased owner of bees appears in the earliest form of the death- telling ceremony, we have an interesting fragment of the primitive house-ritual of our ancestors, which might be ex- tended into other subjects — as, for instance, where it is the house-father in Derbyshire who carried the sacred fire round homestead and fields: a fact not considered beneath the notice of Dugdale.
When, however, we come upon the worship of natural objects, when we can suggest ethnological elements in folk- lore, and when we can speak of the house-father, and can see that duties are imposed upon him by traditional cus- tom, unknown to any rules of civilised society, we are in the presence of facts older than those of historic times. It is thus that folk-lore so frequently points back to the past before the age of history. Over and over again we pause before the facts of folk-lore, which, however ex- plained, always lead us back to some unexplored epoch of history, some undated period, which has not revealed its heroes, but which has left us an heritage of its mental strivings. Some folk-lorists attach this unexplored, undated period to events which are crowded with specific figures atmo doviini, but I am not one of these. For I believe it to be by means of a scientific analysis of each individual item that the folk-lore of to-day is to be traced back to the early European peoples.
If this view is correct, the culture of these people, as it is revealed to us by the classical writers and the chroni- clers, must fall into the series at some given point. In these writers, the early inhabitants of Britain are depicted among the rudest types of people, one of their most amiable practices being to eat the bodies of their deceased
The President'' s Address. 15
parents or relatives. Such practices have alarmed the historian, and, at this stage, we have to meet his suscep- tibilities. In truth, it must be confessed that the pic- ture revealed by the early writers is not a pleasing one. Probably for this reason, or as much for this reason as any other that has found expression, they have been re- jected as the proper ground upon which to found any- thing like historical truth. The terms " savage" and " bar- barian" indulged in by the Greek and Roman writers are rejected by modern authorities as too harsh. They look upon them in the nature of accusations against the stand- ing and position of our ancestors, made by advocates anxious to blacken the national character. Even scholars like Mr. Skene, Mr. Elton, and Professor Rhys, though in- clined to weigh these passages by the light of ethnographic research, throw something like doubt upon the exact extent to which they may be taken as evidence. Mr. Elton, though admitting that the early " romances of travel" afford some evidence as to the habits of our bar- barian ancestors, cannot quite get as far in his belief as to think that the account of " the Irish tribes who thought it right to devour their parents" is much more than a traveller's tale. Professor Rhys is not quite sure that the account by Caesar of the communal marriages of the British is ■" not a passage from some Greek book of imaginary travels among imaginary barbarians which Caisar had in his mind"; and elsewhere he has similar doubts to express, noteworthy among them being the passage from Pliny which illustrates the Godiva story. Mr. Skene lays stress upon the fact that Tacitus " alludes neither to the practice of their staining their bodies with woad nor to the sup- posed community of women among them"; and he offers •some kind of excuse for the Roman evidence as to the tattooing with representations of animals, evidence which Professor Rhys, too, is chary of accepting in its full sense. These are the doubts of scholars accustomed to weigh the value of ethnographic evidence. But, in spite of them,
1 6 The President s Address.
I cannot help expressing the opinion that, when tested by the evidence of folk-lore, those attributes of our ancestors which do happen to have been noted will be found to belong not to isolated peculiarities of a barbarous people, but to a definite stage of human culture, will supply the key to that stage, and will find ample illustration in the culture of modern savages. Thus my point is that the doubts of the historian can be removed only by the researches of the folk-lorist. He would have no misgivings about accept- ing early records when he finds that the records of alm-^st modern times contain fragments of custom and belief whose ancestry is plainly traceable to the savagery depicted in the early records ; and of this there is ample evidence.
These questions as to items of culture belonging to a system of which they are only the indicators, lead me to the third important landmark in the study of folk-lore. This has come to the front since the Congress held last autumn at Burlington House. I mean the place held by customs and institutions as a section of folk-lore.
We have frequently been called " A Fairy-tale Society". I do not object to the title as such, because I love the fairy tales which form part of our stock-in-trade. But I object to it as a title equivalent to folk-lore. In my own mind I have long considered customs and institutions to be pro- perly a section of folk-lore, but it was not until last autumn that any official sanction, so to speak, was given to such an idea. How far is that idea going to be accepted by folk- lorists is the question I am anxious to see settled.
At the present moment the subject is in somewhat a chaotic condition. Students of folk-lore have pretty gener- ally ignored customs and institutions ; and the inattention has been returned with a vengeance. Folk-lore has long been in the habit of looking far afield for the elements necessary for its elucidation — it has ascended the stream of time and seized hold of what fragments there are of ancient faiths and ancient legend ; it has penetrated into the lands of savage races, and has shocked the susceptibilities
The President's Address. 17
of Prof. MaxMuller by so daring an adventure. Butthe study of customs and institutions (except in the one case of mar- riage) has kept within very limited lines, and in Europe it cannot free itself from the influences of ancient Rome. Sir Henry Maine's masterly treatises have scarcely begun their work before the fabric is rudely torn down, and once more we are bid to keep within the meshes of chronological data, and take care to avoid the conclusions of comparative methods. Why should this be ?
My answer is, that the neglect in studying institutions from their folk-lore aspect is primarily the fault of the folk-lorist, who has not hitherto avowedly and openly claimed customs and institutions as part and parcel of his subject-matter. The method has been to pick out a frag- ment of myth, a form of ritual, or a superstition, and to compare them with their fellows in savage life without one thought of the setting in which they are embedded.
But myth, ritual, and superstition make up part of the lives of savages only when they are embedded in the institutions which surround those lives, and the myth, ritual, and superstition in folk-lore corresponding to the savage original was once embedded in similar institutions. The people of Africa, says Mr. MacDonald, worship not so much individually as in villages or communities. This remark holds good of nearly all primitive peoples, and it helps us to understand an observation long ago made by an English writer on the manorial tenant — an observation which is more strictly true than is generally supposed : " His religion is a part of his copyhold." When the jurist talks to us, in highly technical language, of lords, free- holders, villeins, and serfs, we must bear in mind that, at any rate, these villeins and serfs belonged to a social insti- tution, one element of which was religion — a religion which we are studying as folk-lore, while the jurist is studying manor-rolls and land-tenures as customary law, the elements of both studies, however, being derived from the same source. Some interesting researches I have lately been making into
VOL. Ill, c
1 8 The President's Address.
the history of the heriot assists us at this point. As it appears in manorial institutions the heriot is, as you would know, the surrender by a villein-tenant of his best beast ta the lord. Its later history of course leads us on to the evolution of rent ; and it would seem as if we had nothing' here but a phase of economical institutions. But there is some probability, though I do not give it as my final opinion, that its earlier history might be traced back to the ancient custom of the cow following the corpse of the deceased to the grave, where it was sacrificed to his manes ; and here we have, not an economical institution, but a religious ritual.
I do not give this as a " showy" example of the connec- tion between belief and institutions, but because it is illus- trative, in an unusual degree, of my contention that to know properly the beliefs of a people we must know about their institutions as well. Mere floating beliefs incidental to the individual could not effect a lasting place in man's history ; and in studying beliefs we must be careful to discriminate between what belongs to the merely floating superstitions of the hour, liable to be displaced by other superstitions if the influences change, and what belongs, or has belonged, to permanent beliefs identified with the tribe, clan, or people — institutions, in fact.
I will illustrate this principle in the study of beliefs by an example taken from totemism. The origin of totemism has yet to be traced, and I make the suggestion that we must begin by examining the beliefs of the non-totem races. When we do so, we come upon such examples as the people of Ulawa, one of the Solomon Islands, who will not eat the banana because a man of much influence not long ago forbade them doing so after his death, saying that the banana would represent him — that he would be in the banana. Similarly, at Saa, in Malanta, a man, before his death, will say that, after he dies, he will be a shark, and the people will accordingly believe him to be thus repre- sented, and his children will reverence the shark. In the
The President's Address. 19
island of Aurora, in the New Hebrides, women, before the birth of a child, believe that it will be the echo (jiunu) of some particular object, such as a cocoanut, breadfruit, etc., and they believe, therefore, that it would be injurious to the child if it ate that food. Now, here we have totem beliefs, but not totemism. And if, from such evidence, we are justified, as it seems probable, in thinking we have in- dications of the origin of totemism, there are some im- portant facts to notice in the history of primitive belief. We see, from this point of view, that the phenomena of incipient totemism belong to so universal a characteristic of primitive thought that they might be produced in any race over and over again, and yet might never be acted upon and utilised to produce any development in political or social organisation. It is, thus, not the existence of the phenomena which produces totemism ; it is seizing hold of the phenomena by the tribe for the purpose of a new tribal organisation. Given a tribe or race, whose habit of thought has been fossilised into a groove for ages, and the phenomena of totemism might constantly, generation after generation, be reproduced and die out again, to be again produced and to again die out. They are but vague, floating beliefs appertaining to an individual, not belonging to the com- munity ; and thus the principle which I have pointed out must be considered in studying beliefs is fully borne out by the facts presented by totemism.
When we come to take up the subject of institutions as it must be taken up, there is, therefore, much to arrest attention. Papers contributed to the late Congress serve amply to illustrate this, and both Mr. Jevons and Mr. Winternitz have made a splendid beginning in the good work. Now, there is a method of inquiry well known to mathematicians by which they first calculate what a mag- nitude is expected to be, and then, measuring what is actually presented to them, they arrive at the difference between the two. This difference is regarded as an indica- tion of the presence of some agent which was either over-
c 2
20 The President' s Address.
looked or not accurately allowed for in the process of making the "calculation". This seems to me to illustrate best what has been going on in the study of this branch of folk-lore, and, indeed, of all branches. We have calculated what the various magnitudes of folk-lore are expected to be. We have " expected them to be" sun-myths and dawn-myths ; the results of diseased language ; the heritage of a race whose Aryan name is not the only portion of its attributes which has been created by the fancy of scholars. We have expected them to be diluted literature, and, most strange, literature diluted with savagery. We have " expected them to be" the outcome of the Roman genius for organisation and rule. Indeed, our calculations are as numerous as our expectations. But the measurement of the " expected" magnitudes with the " actual" magnitudes is a portion of the work yet to be undertaken seriously. In some slight way I have at- tempted such a measurement in the case of village insti- tutions, and when I found that the measurement did not fit, I sought for the agent which had been overlooked or not accurately allowed for, in ethnology. But though I have had a patient hearing, though some scholars have been able to accept my treatment, if not all my conclu- sions, other scholars in England, in France, and lately in India, are impatient of my exaggerated use, as they term it, of the phenomena of survival in English institutions. But my use of survivals is the use sanctioned by folk-lore, and if I have exaggerated it in its application to institu- tions, so have all folk-lorists exaggerated it in other branches of their study. Those who raise the cry of ex- aggeration, however, do not attempt to explain the presence of survivals at all. When they hear that the freemen of the corporation of Alnwick used formerly to be initiated by being dragged through a well on the town common, they prefer to believe the silly legend about King John having instituted the ceremony because he was once ducked there himself It is an axiom of philologists that
The President's Address. 21
kings and parliaments cannot make new words. I think folk-lorists will look upon it as an axiom that kings could not inaugurate such a ceremony as that at Alnwick, which must have had some more powerful creator than the worst of English kings ; and they will bear in mind that, on the coast of Ireland, is another water ceremony, where the victim is not a prospective freeman of a municipal corpora- tion. Our point is, then, that survivals want accounting for, and, whatever may ultimately prove their proper place in the history of our race, no society is better able to account for them than this, no science better able to cope with the questions at issue than folk-lore ; and I cannot help expressing an earnest hope that we shall now be able to attract to our standard men whose interest in folk-lore does not lie outside institutions — that we shall be able, by our methods and by our aims, to show that we occupy a place among the learned societies occupied by no other body, and which sadly needs being adequately filled.
In India there is a society specially established for the study of institutions, and it has been called by the honored name of Sir Henry Maine ; in England the Folk-lore Society nominally occupies the ground. But if it does not soon actually occupy it by paying attention to these subjects, some other organisation will step in to do its work.
What, then, it appears to me we have now to do is to steadily look our position in the face— ascertain our re- quirements, and organise to meet every emergency. Our study embraces all that is traditional in its origin — folk- tales, hero-tales, legends, superstitions, usages, customs, and institutions. Every branch must be assisted ; every student seeking our aid must be welcomed and assisted ; every member must consider what folk-lore has become under the auspices of this society, and must be a specialist only to enable him to contribute to the general stock of knowledge.
According to my bias, as I frankly term it, I believe the
22 The Presidenf s Address.
traditional element of our national life which penetrates beneath the mighty stream of Christ's religion, which touches prehistoric times through the early notices of our savage ancestors, which is comparable to savage practices at present the property only of savage peoples, is made up of myth, usage, belief, and institutions ; and it is only by getting fast hold of this mosaic that we can adequately interpret the story of our race which it has to tell.
I have left myself but little time to consider our work during the past session, and yet there is much to consider. We have had papers before us on —
1. Desa^iptive Folk-lore :
" Folk-lore of Malagasy Birds," by the Rev. James Sibree. " Notes on Manx Folk-lore," two papers, by Professor
Rhys. " Guardian Spirits of Wells and Lochs," by Rev. Walter
Gregor. " Notes on South African Folk-lore," by Rev. James
MacDonald. " Relic of Samaritan Folk-lore," by Dr. Lowy.
2. Contributive Folk-lore :
" Recent Theories about King Arthur," and the " Lai of
Eliduc," two papers, by Alfred Nutt. " Childe Rowland," by Joseph Jacobs. " Notes on English Folk-drama," by T. Fairman Ordish.
It will be seen that the section of what I have termed Descriptive Folk-lore is the fullest in point of results ; and I am glad it is so. Mr. Sibree has always been a generous contributor to our archives from a land which is particu- larly interesting, and the minute details he was able to throw upon Malagasy totemism is a really important con- tribution to knowledge, as I think it takes the Malagasy peoples out of the category of the non-totem races. Of Professor Rhys's Manx researches it would be impertinent for me to say anything beyond putting on record my
The Presidents Address. 23
opinion of their value, both intrinsically and as models for all inquirers. Mr. Walter Gregor again sends us up a con- tribution of great value from his own home.
In the Contributive section we have two masterly papers by Mr. Nutt, and one by Mr. Jacobs; and the latter must pardon my congratulating him on his attainment, on this occasion, of true folk-lore methods. Mr. Ordish's paper is, I believe, his first study presented to the Society, and it opened up a subject which has been quite neglected by us, and which is capable of yielding splendid results, for the dramatic influences of primitive usage are very great.
A word or two more in conclusion. No doubt my scheme of work is ambitious — perhaps, indeed, too ambi- tious to realise. But I am not the one to shrink from a task, however gigantic, if the possibility of good results looms in the distance. And, moreover, the existence of such a scheme as a working-plan is of great value, because it not only supplies us, as it were, with the necessary pigeon-holes wherein to place all contributions received, but it suggests, and perhaps forms, a habit of research among workers in one common direction. I therefore put forward an urgent appeal to the Society to help me in having these things done. I am willing to do all that lies in me to do, and I ask you, by virtue of the office you have elected me to, to bid me organise bands of willing workers — men and women — who will set about collecting the fragments yet to be discovered, and will read through books, and copy out each item found therein, sending all their discoveries up to a central bureau, and doing it all persistently and faithfully as workers in a common scien- tific cause. If I have your mandate to-night to attempt such an organisation as I can, in my mental vision, see before me ; if I can succeed in imparting to any of you the great necessity there is for our Society to still lead the way as first among folk-lore societies ; if I can put into the feeble words at my limited command some indications of the importance of deliberate work by us all in collective
24 The President' s Address.
organisation, I will undertake to say that all who help in this good work will never regret it ; that as our monument gradually rises from the ground-work into something like perfection, hours and hours of pleasurable toil will have re- placed many a moment which would have been occupied less profitably, and if I know anything of the ups and downs of life, many a moment of trouble and regret. Give me, then, I pray you, the mandate I ask at your hands ; signalise my personally weak presidency by making it scientifically strong.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the land of Eutopia — as in that London which Mr. Morris has dreamed about in his beautiful dreams — all things are done for love. We folk- lorists do things for love of folk-lore, and we find each other thinking good things of each other, and saying what capital people we all are. But outside the charmed band exists a hard and cruel world, who pretend to say that they cannot live upon love, even upon the love that folk- lore produces for the human species. That outside world demands money — money for postages, for travelling, for printing, and for that awfully portentous item, " miscel- laneous." Therefore, it behoves folk-lorists — or, at least, the Folk-lore Society collectively — to possess a banker, a treasurer, and a cash balance. I believe if we do good work we shall soon possess the inestimable blessing of a good cash balance. It is hopeless to expect that a cash balance and a satisfied treasurer will precede good work — it is putting the cart before the horse. The Council, as you have heard in the Report, is attempting much, and I am happy to say that two volunteers already, without any suggestion but their own desires, have asked me to give them some work to do, and they must pardon me if I mention their names — Miss Dendy and Miss Richardson. A suggestion I have to make is that the Council should place some of its accumulation of work into the hands of small committees of members, not on the Council, perhaps presided over by a member of the Council ; and I would
The President's Address. 25
especially suggest a committee of ladies. But whether or not this particular method be the best to adopt — and perhaps we may presently have an expression of opinion on the subject — I can assure the two volunteers, and those who may hereafter offer their aid, that they shall not long remain idle.
1 have wearied you, I fear, with overmuch detail — over- much straining at points which, to some, may be so obvious as not to need even a passing mention in a presidential address, and an over-ambitious scheme of requirements. My justification will, I hope, be found in the new progress which the Society will make this coming year ; and if you will withhold your censures, I am willing to defer receiving any acknowledgments until, at the expiration of my year's term of office, my successor will sit in judgment and tell you whether my view of the case was appropriate to the present position of the Folk-lore Society.
G. Laurence Gomme.
THE
LAI OF ELIDUC AND THE MARC HEN OF LITTLE SNOW-WHITE.
" T WILL tell you a very ancient Breton lay, and as I
± heard it I will retell it.
" There dwelt a knight in Brittany named EHduc, brave and courteous, and a right worthy man. A wife he had of gentle blood and bearing. Long time they dwelt together, and faithfully did they love one another. But Eliduc had to seek service afar off, and there he loved a damsel ; daughter was she of a king and queen ; Guilliadun was her name, and she was the fairest maid of all her land. Now Eliduc's wife was named Guildeluec, and so this lay is sometimes called the lay of Guilliadun and of Guildeluec ; but its first name is the lay of Eliduc. What happened, and wherefore this lay was made, I will tell you truthfully."
Thus does Marie de France begin the Lai of Eliduc, which she may have heard either in Jkittany or in Western England, and which she wrote down sometime in the second half of the I2th century. 'Tis an adventure, says she, which man ought not to forget, and for this it was the ancient Bretons, full of courtesy (and by courtesy one must understand a fine appreciation of the sentiment of love as it was preached and practised in the courts of France, and of all countries subject to French influence in the I2th and 13th centuries), made the lay. By "Breton" there can be little doubt that Marie meant inhabitants of the present Brittany, the ancient Armorica. As we shall see, the scene of the story is partly Brittany, partly South-Western England. The fact that Marie recognised the lay as a
Eli due and Little Snow- White. 27
distinctly Breton production by no means precludes the possibility of her having heard it in this country.
The contents of the lay are briefly as follows : — Eliduc, from being the most trusted vassal of his master, King of Lesser Britain, loses all favour, and resolves to seek service elsewhere. He parts from his wife in great grief and sorrow, assuring her that he will keep his faith to her whole and good. Setting sail with ten knights, he comes to Totness (Toteneis). In that land are many chiefs, one of whom at Exeter (Excestre) is powerful, but very aged. And because he will not give his daughter in marriage he is warred upon by rejected suitors, and sorely pressed. Eliduc offers his services, and defeats the king's enemies. The king keeps both him and his men a whole year by him, and makes him warden of his land.
Now Eliduc was courteous and discreet, fair to look upon, generous and debonnair. So the king's daughter, hearing much good of him, begged him, through her chamberlain, to visit her. Eliduc complied. And when they met after a while the damsel considered attentively what manner of man he was, his face and his stature and his bearing, and Love flung his dart bidding her love him ; and she paled and sighed, but would in nowise tell the cause, lest he should think lightly of her. On his side Eliduc went away sad and pensive, thinking of the maiden, his lord's daughter, who called him so sweetly, and who sighed. Then he minded him of his wife, and how he vowed his faith to her. But the damsel all night long neither lay down nor slept, and at daybreak she opened her heart to her chamberlain. By his advice she sent Eliduc a golden ring and a scarf And when Eliduc received them, he put the ring on his finger and the scarf round his body, and thereat the king's daughter was greatly glad. But Eliduc had neither joy nor pleasure. Evermore he thought of the king's daughter, and evermore he thought of his wife, and how he had vowed faith to her. Now one day as the king was playing at chess, and his daughter at his side, Eliduc entered, and the king
28 Eliduc and Little Snow- White.
said to his daughter, " Maiden, thou shouldst be at one with this knight; do him great honour; I have none better.'" Right glad was the maiden, and she rose and called Eliduc, and they sat afar off from the others, and she dared say no word to him, and he feared to speak to her. But at last their mutual love was fully told.
Now the King of Lesser Britain being hard-pressed by his foes, repented him of the injustice he had done Eliduc and sent to him, begging his aid and service. Eliduc could not refuse his first lord. But when he came to speak to Guilliadun, at the first word she swooned, and he lamenting, and ofttimes kissing her mouth, and weeping sorely, " Sweet my friend," said he, " you are my life and death ; you have my faith, and I will surely return." So Guilliadun yielded, and with many a kiss and vow the lovers parted.
All in his land were overjoyed to see Eliduc, above all his wife. But he was ever sad for his love's sake, and nothing that he saw yielded him joy. This grieved his wife's heart, and she often asked him if he had heard aught to her disfavour.
So the time went by until Eliduc should return to Guil- liadun, as he had promised. He passed over secretly into England, and carried her off at nightfall. But when they were got on the high seas, and were nigh the coast, the wind rose, and the masts were broken, and the sails torn. Prayers to the saints and to the Virgin were of no avail, so that at last a squire cried, " What boots it. Lord, to pray ? have we not here the cause of our peril. Never may we come to land, so being that you, with wedded wife at home, are carrying this one with you against God and law, against right and loyal dealing." But when Guilliadun heard these words she fell fainting and colourless, and in that state did she remain. Eliduc having flung the squire into the sea, seized the helm, and brought the ship to land. Then bethinking himself where he might find a fitting burial- place for the body of his love, still deeming her to be dead, he minded him of a hermit who dwelt hard by in a great
Eliduc and Little Snow-White. 29
forest. Thither he carried the damsel's body ; when as he came to the hermit's chapel, he found it void and abandoned, the hermit having died eight days before. So he laid the damsel's body before the altar, and, with tears and sighs and kisses, left it there. Thereafter he came every day to the chapel, and behold his lady's face changed not, only it became a little paler. But the wife of Eliduc, finding him bereft of speech and gladness, wondered at his daily absence, and setting watch upon him, learnt his visits to the chapel. On the morrow Eliduc must needs fare to court, and the lady rode forth to the chapel. Entering, she beheld the damsel on the couch, and she was like a fresh- blown rose. Seeing that body, those arms so long and white, those fingers so slim and taper, she knew her husband's woe. " Full well I feel it," said she, " for I too pity, and tenderness fills my heart, and never more shall joy be mine." Thus did she lament as she sat by the damsel's couch. But of a sudden a weasel ran across the body, and the lady's squire slew it with his staff As it lay dead its mate came running, and would fain have raised its head or made it move, and being unable, seemed sore distressed. Then running forth into the wood, it returned with a flower, scarlet of hue, which laying on its dead mate's mouth, life was restored. The lady saw and marvelled. Seizing the flower, she laid it on Guilliadun's mouth, whereat the damsel sighed and opened her eyes. " Dear God," said she, " long have I slept." Then she told the lady her story, and bewailed her cruel fate. But the lady bid her comfort herself " Eliduc still loves you. I, his wife, may not tell you how grievous to me is his despair, nor may I say how joyful to me your revival. Return with me, and I will place your hand in that of your friend. I will release him from his vows, and I will take the veil." Thus she sent her squire to tell Eliduc that Guilliadun still lived. Over- joyed, he hastened home, and finding there his sweet friend, tenderly rendered thanks to his wife, and much and often did he embrace the maiden, and she him full sweetly. The
30 Eliduc and Little Snotv-White.
lady then begged her lord to give her leave to serve God.. An abbey was founded by Eliduc, and the lady took the veil together with thirty nuns. So Eliduc wedded his love ; many days they lived together, and ever was perfect tenderness between them. And lastly Eliduc, founding a rich church, devoted himself wholly to the service of God, whilst Guilliadun joined his first wife, to whom she was dear as her own sister. So they three passed in holy wise their remaining days, praying for each other, and mutually exhorting each other to the love of God.
Everyone knows the story of Little Snow-White, of Schneewittchen persecuted by her jealous stepmother, welcomed by the dwarfs in the forest, and preserved,, apparently lifeless, although in the full bloom of her beauty, in the glass case guarded by the seven dwarfs, until the destined prince appears. At first blush there is nothing in common between this tale and the Lai of Eliduc, save the one incident of the heroine's suspended animation, and this is preceded and followed by such entirely different incidents as seem effectually to discriminate the stories. But it is a canon of storyology never to judge a tale by one version, but to examine all the variants. These, so- far as Germany is concerned, are brought together by Grimm, iii, 87 et seq., whilst the fullest enumeration of the non-German variants is to be found in Gonzenbach, p. 202. The versions range from the Balkan peninsula to Iceland,^ and from Russia to Catalonia ; Germany and Italy being the two countries in which the greatest number have been noted.
In one of Grimm's variants a count and countess meet the heroine by the wayside, and the count loves her, and would fain have her with them in their carriage, but his lady seeks only how she may be rid of her. Here then wifely, and not stepmotherly, jealousy is the motive of the plot. This is still more so in the Neapolitan version^ written down by Basile in the early part of the 17th century {Pentanieronc, v, 5). The heroine having at the-
Elidnc and Little Snow- White. 3 r
age of seven fallen into a death-in-life condition, her body- is enclosed in seven crystal coffers by her mother, and is locked up in a room. The mother dies, leaving her house and all her belongings to her brother, whom she strictly charges to let no one enter the locked room. The brother lays the charge upon his wife, but she, of course, no sooner his back turned, has no first thought save to enter the forbidden chamber. Her reflections contrast amusingly with those of Guildeluec. Some may think them more legitimate as well as more natural : " Well done, Mr. Keep-your-troth, Mr. Clean out- and dirty in-side, so this was the cause of your precious anxiety to let no one in, this is your idol which you needs come and worship daily." After which, having by her violence caused the enchanted comb which kept the maiden entranced to drop out, and thereby brought her back to life, she treated her worse than a slave. Finally, in a Roumanian version (Schott, 6), other- wise closely akin to Schneewittchen, the heroine, blinded by her mother, is healed by the Virgin, even as Guilliadun is brought back to life by Guildeluec.
These few examples show more likeness between the two narratives than one could guess from the study of Schneewittchen alone. Still one cannot say that these parallels carry us very far, and as a matter of fact no one ever thought of comparing incircJien with lai. The greatest of living storyologists, Dr. Reinhold Kohler, has annotated both Eliduc and the Sicilian versions of Little Snow-White, and in neither case did he attempt to connect the two stories.
When, nearly twelve years ago, I read my first paper before the Folk-lore Society — that critical examination of Campbell's collection which contained the germ of all the scientific work I have been able to accomplish since — I noticed the absence of the Schneewittchen formula from the Gaelic mdrchen store. It was therefore with profound interest that in 18S8 I noted a Scotch-Gaelic version collected by Mr. Kenneth Macleod, printed by my friend
32 Eliduc and Little Snow-White.
Mr. MacBain, in vol. xiii of the Celtic Magazine (pp. 213 et seq.), and since reprinted in Celtic Fairy Tales. I give below a summary of the tale, " Gold-tree and Silver-tree," with the more important passages in full.
Silver-tree, the wife, is jealous of Gold-tree, the daughter ; she consults a trout in a well as to who is fairest, and learns it is her daughter, whereat she takes to her bed, and declares one thing alone will heal her, her daughter's heart and liver. A he-goat's heart and liver are given her, and Gold-tree is sent off secretly and married to a foreign king. After a year Silver-tree consults the trout again, and learns that her daughter is still alive. She sets sail for the foreign land, and kills Gold-tree with a poisoned stab in her finger ; but so beautiful did Gold-tree look that her husband would not bury her, but locked her in a room where no one would get near her. " After a while he married again, and the whole house was under the hand of this wife but one room, and he himself kept the key. One day he forgot the key, and the second wife got into the room. What did she see there but the most beautiful woman she ever saw," Taking the poisoned stab out of her finger. Gold-tree rose alive as beautiful as she was ever. At the fall of night the prince came home downcast. " What bet," said his wife, " would you put to me that I would make you laugh ?" " Nothing could make me laugh, save Gold-tree to come alive." " Well, you have her alive down there in the room !" When the prince saw Gold-tree, he began to kiss her and kiss her and kiss her, so that the second wife said he had better stick to her and she would go away. " No," said the prince, "indeed you will not go away, but I shall have both of you." It is then told how the wicked Silver-tree is punished, thanks to the second wife, and the story winds up with " the prince and his two wives were long alive after this, pleased and peaceful, and there I left them."
It is hardly necessary to set out all the interesting points of contact between this and other versions of the Snow- White formula, as well as between it and the Breton lai.
Elidtic and Little Snow- White. 33
Gold-tree is with her husband when the death-in-life trance befalls her, even as Guilliadun is with her affianced husband. She is locked into a chamber as is the Neapolitan damsel ; found by her husband's wife as is Basile's heroine by her uncle's wife. But these parallels are slight indeed compared with the remarkable one afforded by the conduct of the two Celtic wives : like Guildeluec, the prince's second wife welcomes her rival ; like her, she tells him of the joy that is his ; like her, she offers to go away and leave them to their happiness, I confess I am more taken with the frank and unaffected naturalistic paganism of the modern Gaelic tale than with the monkishness of the 12th century lai. The ending is more original, if not more charming. Little objection indeed did the large-hearted husband meet to his offer, and the last we hear of the three is that they were " pleased and peaceful".
In his notes to Gold-tree and Silver-tree, Mr. Jacobs wrote as follows {^Celtic Fai7'y Tales, p. 252") : — " It is unlikely I should say impossible, that this tale, with the incident of the dormant heroine, should have arisen independently in the Highlands, it is most likely an importation from abroad. Yet in it occurs a most ' primitive' incident, the bigamous household of the hero. On the ' survival' method of investi- gation this would probably be used as evidence for polygamy in the Highlanders. Yet if, as is probable, the story came from abroad, this trait may have come with it, and only implies polygamy in the original home of the tale." When I first read this note I demurred to the supposition of importation within a comparatively recent period, yet I could urge nothing against it. It certainly seemed more likely that the isolated Celtic version should be due to borrowing, than that it should represent the original stock, always provided the hypothesis of independent development from a common mythic germ were set aside as inadequate. It was long since I had read Marie's lays, and no thought of connecting the Celtic folk-tale with Eliduc crossed my mind. But only a few weeks later I read in the Revue des
VOL. III. D
34 Eliduc and Little Snow-White.
Deux-Mondes (Oct. 15th), Mons, Joseph Bedier's equally erudite and charming article on Marie de France. There- in the lai of Eliduc is analysed at length, and as I read, the supreme interest of the Gaelic tale was borne in upon me.
It hardly needs to point out what that interest is. Con- nection of some sort between the two narratives must be patent to all ; evident also that the story of Eliduc is a civilised and Christianised version of that found in Gold-tree and Silver-tree. I say evident to all, as I cannot think it will be seriously urged that the lai of Eliduc made its way to Northern Scotland, and was there shorn of its ecclesi- astical ending, and otherwise transmuted as we now find it. But it is not safe to take for granted that a certain school of storyologists will refrain from any contention, however desperate, in support of their views, and I will therefore cite one argument which seems to me absolutely conclusive in favour of my argument that Eliduc has been deliberately altered to its present shape. In the great majority of folk- tales, as indeed of most forms of narrative, the interest of the story depends upon complications wrought by the agency of a " villain", a villain technically being anyone who opposes the hero or heroine. In Eliduc the "villain" is the squire, whose words on board ship throw the heroine into her death-in-life trance, and as " villain" he is fitly punished by being straightway cast overboard. But he it is who embodies the moral sentiment of the narrator and of the better part of her audience. It is inconceivable that this antinomy should be the deliberate act of Marie or of her predecessor, if either had invented the story ; equally inconceivable that it could appear in any genuine folk-tale, an unfailing characteristic of which is that it never deviates into sympathy for the villain. We can see as clearly as if the process went on before our eyes how one special incident of the folk-tale appealing to the minstrel's fancy, that incident was transformed to suit the taste of a different audience. As generally happens in these mediaeval adap-
Eliduc and Little Snow- White. 35
tations of the common folk-tale, the adaptor cared little for logical consistency, so that whilst his villain represents the high-water mark of moral sentiment in the story, he yet •suffers as he did in the primitive folk-tale, where he was thought of as wholly bad, simply because his action incon- venienced hero and heroine.
Admit Eliduc to be a modification of a previously existing folk-tale, and the conclusion cannot be resisted that its original must have been closely akin to the original of Gold-tree and Silver-tree. Unless indeed we can point to any other narrative type which is equally or more likely to have given rise to the lai as we now have it.
There is a widely spread narrative type which in the Middle Ages was localised in widely separated districts, and furnished the matter of many favourite stories — that of the Husband with two Wives.
This cycle has been briefly studied by Mons. Gaston, Paris {Comptes rendus de PAcad. des Inscr. et Belles-Lettres, 1887, pp. 577-586). One of the best known of the stories belonging to it is that of the Count of Gleichen, whose tomb is still shown between that of his two wives. But this cycle, so far as studied, is really of literary origin, and goes back to the Breton lai. Thus one of the oldest forms, the French metrical romance of Ille et Gateron, by Walter ■of Arras, recently made accessible in Professor Forster's admirably handy edition in his Romanische Bibliothek, is, as the learned editor argues, based entirely upon the Lai of Eliduc, with such developments as were required to spin out a story of r,ooo lines to one of 6,000, and such modifi- cations as the poet deemed necessary to suit the theme to the taste of his patrons and patronesses, among them the Countess Marie of Champagne, the leading love- casuist of North France, under whose auspices it was that the theory of love, as professed by all the courtly spirits of the time, was elaborated and codified. Now, as one of the texts of this code ran. Nemo potest duplici auiore ligari, it is evident that Walter had a task of some difficulty before
D 2
36 Eliduc and Little Snow- White.
him, and his work deserves an instant's consideration, ex- cellent example as it is of the way in which the Breton lais (themselves, I believe, adaptations of current folk-tales) were turned into long romances. The adventures of Eliduc at the court of the King of Exeter are, to some extent, used twice over: firstly, in the account of how Ille wins the love of his first wife, Galeron, sister to the Duke of Brittany, and then — when Ille, having lost his eye in a tournament, and fearing his wife will love him no more^ flees from her — in the account of the help he gives the Emperor of Rome, and of the love he excites in the breast of the Emperor's daughter Ganor. But Galeron, instead of staying quietly at home, as does Guildeluec, seeks her truant husband, and finds him just as he, thinking her to be dead, is about to wed Ganor, out of pity for her great love. Galeron then offers, as does Guildeluec, to retire to a convent, but Ille will have none of the proposal, returns with her to Brittany, and there they live happily for many years. But Galeron, being in sore peril in childbirth, vows herself to the service of God if she wins through. This happens, and Ille, thus released, sets forth in search of Ganor, delivers her from great peril, and finally weds her.
The above brief ab.stract suffices to show the softening of the original polygamous feature begun in Eliduc fully carried out by Marie's contemporary. In the process, the " villain" has completely disappeared — as was, indeed, to be expected. The fact is, however, instructive to note for any who may hold that the lai of Eliduc is the source of the folk-tales. When we do find a derivative of the Breton lai, the development is in the very opposite direction.
The ersions hitherto cited of the " Husband and Two Wives" can thus throw no light upon the origin of Eliduc ; on the contrary, they must be looked upon as mere literary offshoots from the lai stock. There is, however, one version which has never yet been mentioned in this connec- tion to my knowledge, which cannot be directly connected with Eliduc, but which may be, and I believe is, an inde-
Eliduc and Little Snow- White. 37
pendent growth from the same root as that from which Marie's poem has sprung. I allude to the Amleth (Ham- let) story told by Saxo Grammaticus in the fourth book of his Historia Danica. After the slaying of his uncle-step- father, Amleth returns to Britain to his wife, daughter of the king of that land. When he tells his father-in-law what has happened, the latter is greatly perplexed. There was an old covenant between himself and Amleth's step- father, that whoever survived should avenge the other'.s death. To fulfil his promise, he sends his son-in-law to woo for him a Scottish Amazon, who loathed her lovers, and always inflicted upon them the uttermost punishment. But the queen loving Amleth ("the old she utterly abhorred, desiring the embraces of the young") for his wise and valorous deeds, craftily substitutes for the message of his father-in-law one directing that he should be married to her. Amleth readily falls in with the plan, and returns to Britain with his new bride. On his way he meets his first wife, who has come to warn him against her father. Her words (I quote from Mr. Elton's translation, to be issued shortly by the Folk-lore Society) are worth noting. Speaking of her own son, she says: " He may hate the sup- planter of his mother. I will love her ; no disaster shall put out my flame for thee," etc. Amleth, later, gets the better of his father-in-law, and goes back with his wives to his own land, i.e., Denmark. After a while he is defeated and slain by a competitor for the Danish throne, and the second wife, Hermutrude, yields herself up of her own accord to be the victor's spoil and bride.
I cannot but think that Saxo is giving us here at second, if not at third hand a distorted version of an heroic legend that his countrymen heard in Celtic Britain. My chief reason for believing this is supplied by the Scottish {i.e., Celtic) Amazon queen, whom the King of Britain sends Amleth to woo for him. The warrior virgin who will only yield to the perfect hero, and who treats her other wooers much as the female spider treats hers, is, of course, a con-
^S Eli due mid Little Snow- White.
stant of heroic tradition. As Brunhild she plays a great part in the most famous hero-tale of the Germans. But certain characteristics clearly differentiate the Irish from the German representatives of the part. There is an un- human independence of, or indifference to the mortal wooer, a divine abandon when she decides to yield, a callousness to the fate of the particular mortal on whom she bestows her favours, that stamp her of the kin of the immortals, that place her on a different level from such beings, transcendently endowed with valour and high- heartedness, yet women all the same, as Sigrun or Brun- hild. These characteristics are clearly marked in Saxo's heroine, whose conduct after Amleth's death moves the worthy chronicler to one of his familiar outbursts of rhetorical commonplace about the fickleness of woman. Note, too, that Amleth's first wife is as ready to sub- ordinate herself to her rival as are Guildeluec or the second wife in Gold-tree.
It may be urged that the name Hermutrude is non- Celtic, but I do not think this point is of the slightest importance. Saxo would almost certainly give his per- sonages a recognisable name, even if, as is not likely, his Danish informants had retained and correctly rendered an alien Celtic one.
So far, then, the consideration of allied stories has strengthened my general proposition by showing, both : that another possible offshoot from the original of Eliduc exists, and that the derivatives of Eliduc show no tendency to revert to the folk-tale type. A close examination of the lai and the recently collected folk-tales may further support the contention that the Scotch-Gaelic tale probably repre- sents the original of Marie's poem, and almost certainly is not derived from the continental versions.
With regard to the date of the tat, a terminus ad qiiem is furnished by that of Illeet Galcron, finished, as Prof Forster shows, in 1167. By this time, then, Marie's poem, or one closely resembling it, must have enjoyed wide favour. But
Eliduc and Little Snow- White. 39
indeed we can carry the date much further back. Marie herself describes it as ancient, but we cannot lay much stress upon this. A work barely two generations old may well have seemed ancient in her eyes and in those of her contemporaries. Internal evidence affords surer ground. The lai must have been composed at a time when there was frequent and easy communication between Brittany and Southern England, and when the condition of the latter country was such that the Breton poet knew, or could imagine, that it was parcelled out between a number of petty kings. This seems to preclude a post-Conquest date. The Breton allies of the Conqueror received liberal grants of territory in South-Western England ; in the second half of the nth and the first half of the 12th century the chief men of the district were also leading members of the Breton nobility, so that a Breton minstrel of that period could hardly have been so far unaware of the real state of contemporary Southern England as to draw the picture of it we find in Eliduc. The mention of Totness gives us no precise date. We know that at the Conquest it was already a borough town and a considerable port, more- over that in the early 12th century it enjoyed legendary renown, as Geoffrey makes Brutus land there on his first arrival in England. Whether this is to be brought into any connection with early migrations between Britain and Armorica is perhaps doubtful, but it seems to argue a long- standing traditional belief that Totness was the chief port of South Devon. I think we may assign the composition of the contents of the lai, substantially as retold by Marie, to some period prior to 1056.
Turning from the material to the moral conditions of the lai, we note that although bigamy is held to be sinful, yet no form of divorce or other kind of ecclesiastical separation seems necessary. The arrangement between Eliduc and his two wives is apparently a family one, with which the Church has no concern. I do not profess to say how far this reflects possible historical conditions, or is simply to
40 Eliduc and Little Snow- White.
be attributed to a heedless and unlegal-minded minstrel. Be the origin of this feature what it may, it certainly adds to the archaic air which the lai, as a whole, wears.
Turning to the German folk-tale, we note that according to Grimm (iii, 87) the form of the heroine's name is Low- German, and is retained even in High-German versions. This would indicate, if anything, a spread from north to south. The tale opens with the red-white-black incident, which, as I have abundantly shown (Maclnnes, pp. 431 and 435), is met with in Irish sagas earlier than elsewhere in modern Europe, and has from the i ith century downwards been a prominent commonplace of Celtic story-telling. If it is denied, as some deny, that such an incident may originate indepen- dently in different lands, and if it is denied, as many deny, that it is impossible for such an incident to be a portion of the proethnic Aryan story-stock, then I maintain that those who thus deny are bound to look for the origin of the incident there where it occurs earliest and most frequently. And that is in the Gaelic-speaking districts of these islands. Again, it should be noted that in several of Grimm's variants the rhyme of the jealous queen runs thus :
"Spiegel unter den Bank, Sich in dieses Land, sich in jenes Land, Wer ist die schonste in EngellandV
I do not lay much stress upon this, as from the fourth century onwards, England, thanks to its geographical position and to a natural bit of popular etymology, repre- sented the Otherworld to the continental German races. In one case (Musaus' version) the rhyme-word is " Braband". Lay as little weight upon these indications as one likes — and in my opinion they do not carry much weight — still they serve to localise the German versions in the Low-German- speaking lands, the connection of which with these islands was always close.
In comparing the German and Gaelic tales there is one incident which cannot, I think, but strike every unprejudiced
Eliduc and Little Snow- White. 41
observer as being more archaic in the Gaelic than in the German version. I mean the mode of divination practised by the jealous queen. In Schneewittchen and in most of the continental variants she consults her mirror, in Gold- tree a trout in a well. No competent judge but will say that in the loth century, the period to which we have inferentially carried back the original of Eliduc, the latter is the more likely mode. Now in one of Grimm's variants the jealous queen consults a dog, Spiegel by name. Which is the more likely, that the mirror of several versions arose from a misunderstanding of the name of the divining animal, or that one narrator altered mirror to dog ? In any case the magic fish of knowledge (generally a salmon) is promi- nent in Gaelic myth. The fullest English account is that of O'Curry {^Manners attd Customs, ii, 142 et seq.), para- phrasing the Shannon legend found in the Dindsenchas, a topographico-mythical poem of the loth-iith century, other early nth century references to the myth being also given. Later use of this mythic idea abounds in Gaelic legend. It is surely more sensible, as well as more scien- tific, to refer the trout in the well of the Gaelic folk-tale to this old Gaelic mythic conception, rather than to suppose that a Gaelic story-teller, having heard a version of Schnee- wittchen, substituted a trout for a mirror. Is it not, on the contrary, evident that the clear surface of the well led by a natural transition to the mirror of the German versions ?
What are the principal elements in the hypothetical original of Eliduc and of the Gaelic tales? — the situation of the hero between the two heroines, the death-in-life condition of one heroine brought about by the " villain". Now somewhat similar elements, though differently com- bined, are to be found in one of the oldest Irish hero-tales — the Sick Bed of Cuchulainn. The text is found in the Leabhar na h' Uidhre (Z U.), and professes to be transcribed from an older MS., the Yellow Book of Slam. Like most of the sagas in LU., it is, as Professor Zimmer
42 Eliduc and Little Sfiozu-Wkite.
has convincingly shown, an attempt to harmonise different and somewhat conflicting versions. As our present text was compiled in the early nth century, the versions upon which it is based must be much older. Indeed, there is. little reason to doubt that the elements of the story belong to the oldest stratum of Irish fancy, and that these ele- ments were combined, much as we find them in the nth century text, not later than the 7th century. In this saga Cuchulainn is loved by a queen of Faery, Fand.. She comes to earth in bird-guise, and is wounded by the hero. She throws him into a magic sleep, visits him, and thrashes him to such purpose that for a year he lies on his. couch, away from the court and all his friends, and can speak to nobody. Healed by faery intervention, he visits the Otherworld, and brings back Fand with him. The jealousy of his mortal wife Emer is thereby aroused, and she bitterly reproaches him. Fand thereupon returns to the Otherworld, and Cuchulainn and Emer, to whom a magic drink of forgetfulness is given, are left at peace with one another.
Here, then, we have the husband and the two wives, and the death-in-life trance of one of the chief actors in the story. I suggest no connection, I do not for a moment imply that we have before us two variants of the same theme, differentiated by the fact that in the one the hero,, in the other the heroine, undergoes the magic trance. I merely point out that a story involving the same essential elements as those of the prototype of Eliduc and Gold-tree was one of the most famous of Gaelic legends. If the race: could fashion the one story it could fashion the other.
Hitherto in my argument I have tacitly and implicitly accepted the"transmissionist" postulate. This I take to be that the similarity of folk-tale in modern Europe is to be accounted for by the transmission from definite centres within historic times of complete and well-rounded narra- tives. Still, for argument's sake, taking my stand on this platform, let me meet a possible objection arising from the
Eliduc and Little Snow-White. 43,
South-Italian variants of the Snow-White formula. As we have seen, Basile is nearer than is Grimm to Gold-tree, the assumed representative of the oldest type of the nar- rative. But Italy is farther from Gaeldom than is Low Germany ! So the transmissionist may urge. Now, para- doxical as the statement may appear, Italy is closer to Celtdom than is Germany. The " salt estranging sea" is often a surer link than the land. In the loth and nth centuries the Norman adventurers overran and founded king- doms in Sicily and Southern Italy. But Norman and Breton were closely allied ; Breton chiefs and soldiers accompanied the descendants of the Vikings. And thus it comes about that in the early 12th century we find numerous traces of the Arthurian romance throughout the Italian peninsula in the shape of personal names taken from the Romance cycle; thus it is that a late 12th century writer localises Avalon near Mount Etna. All the contentions I have striven to establish are, if the transmissionists knew it, in favour of their thesis, if they will only give up the main article of their creed, viz., that stories can be invented nowhere save in the East, and that every example of transmission must be from East to West. The present investigation does not affect the arguments for or against the transmission theory per se, and therefore I shall not pause to expound my reasons for believing that that theory only accounts for a very few of the problems of folk-lore. I am quite satis- fied if I can show that even the straitest partisan of that theory may accept my proof without its being necessary for him to revise all the articles of his creed.
Before drawing what are, I think, the legitimate con- clusions from the facts I have been considering, I should like to say a few words about the polygamy incident which induced Mr. Jacobs to write his note. I agree with him that the tale as it stands would not be sufficient warrant for the existence of polygamy in early Gaeldom. I may add that the fact of that polygamy, which is as thoroughly established as anything can well be, would not in itself be a sufficient.
44 Eliduc and Little Snow-White.
warrant for the Gaelic origin of the folk-tale. But we know that polygamy was a Gaelic practice, and we have a tale in which it appears, and which professes to be Gaelic, a profession supported by a number of other considerations. Surely we are entitled, under these circumstances, to use the incident as evidence both of the Gaelic origin of the tale and of the survival of the practice in the folk-mind long after it had vanished from the social system.
With regard to the evidence for polygamy among the early Gaels I will cite but one instance, and this I cite not because there is the slightest necessity to advance proof for a custom as well established historically as that of trial by jury in modern England, but because the instance itself is of great interest to folk-lorists, and because it throws a most curious light upon early Irish Christianity. I allude to the birth-story of Aed Slane, high king of Ireland from 594 to 600 according to the Four Masters. The story runs thus :
Once upon a time there was a great gathering of Gaels in Tailtin. And the king, Diarmaid, son of Fergus Cerbel, was there with his two wives, Mairend the Bald and Mugain of Munster. Now Mugain was jealous of Mairend, and egged on a satirist to make her rival remove the golden crown wherewith the bald one hid her shame. So the satirist craved a boon of the queen, and being gain- said, tore the crown from her head. " God and (St.) Ciaran be my help !" cried out the queen, and before a glance could be cast at her, behold the long, fine wavy golden locks were over the ford of her shoulders, such was the marvellous might of Ciaran. Then, turning to her rival, Mairend said, " Mayst thou suffer shame for this in the presence of the men of Ireland." Thereafter Mugain became barren, and she was sad, because the king was minded to put her away, and because all the other wives of Diarmaid were fruitful. So she sought help of (St.) Finden, and the cleric blessed water and gave her to drink, and she conceived. Suffice to say that the Saint's intervention was at first by no
Eliduc and Little Snow-Wkite. 45
means successful ; first a lamb, and then a silver trout were born, but finally Aed Slane, and he was the chief man of his day in Ireland.
The story has come down to us in two forms : {a) a prose text, which I have abridged above ; {b) a poem by Flann Manistrech, who died in 1056 ; this merely gives the birth- story, omitting the rivalry between the two queens. The prose story as we have it mentions the poem, and would thus seem to be later than it ; but Mr. Whitley Stokes tells me that its language is, if anything, somewhat older, although it cannot be dated much before the beginning of the nth century. Prose and verse would thus seem to be inde- pendent versions connected in L U. by the paragraph con- cerning Flann's poem. The polygamy and the intervention of the two saints certainly picture manners and feeling as old, to say the least, as the alleged date of the personages. In the poem the animal births are interpreted in a Christian sense, both lamb and fish being symbols of Christ. See- ing, however, that we have to do with a story of rivalry and jealousy, it is allowable to compare the incident with the one, so frequent in folk-tales, in which the queen is accused by an enemy of giving birth to an animal, and is in consequence driven away by her husband. It is even allowable to speculate whether this form, the normal one, of the incident is not secondary, whether originally the enemy did not actually by the power of magic cause the offspring of the heroine to be animal instead of human. But such speculations would, I admit, at present be rather en fair.
The miraculous growth of hair recalls at once the Godiva legend. Here, there can be little doubt, the present form of the story is not the original one. The point must have been that the countess rode naked, and that the covering of hair was a miraculous protection against unholy curio- sity. A similar conception is almost a commonplace in early Christian legend. The most familiar, as well as the oldest form known, is that found in the Acts of St. Agnes.
46 Eliduc and Little Snow- White.
Here the hair covers the whole body. As this narrative is due to St. Ambrose, and as St. Agnes is mentioned in the nth century Irish Martyrology known as the Calendar of Oengtis, it is probable that the legend was known to the early Irish Church, and if so, it is possible that the incident in our tale may be due to it.^ On the other hand, Mr. Whitley Stokes tells me that he knows no other example of the incident in Irish literature. Considering, too, the pride taken by the Gaulish chieftains in the beauty and length of their hair, as testified to by classical writers ; considering, moreover, the Irish rule which forbade the kingly throne to anyone possessed of a personal blemish, it seems to me quite as likely that the Mairend-Mugain story, if not founded on fact, is the outcome of Irish invention, as that it is a loan from the St. Agnes legend. The point deserves attention from those familiar with Irish as well as with continental hagiology.
I do not wish to labour the argument further. There can, I think, be no reasonable doubt that I have suffici- ently proved my contention, and that the Gaelic tale of Gold-tree and Silver-tree, collected in North Scotland within the last few years, must be looked upon as the re- presentative of a tale which flourished in the loth century, a literary offshoot of which was the lai of Eliduc, and which viay have been carried by Breton minstrels to Southern Italy, by Danish Vikings to North Germany, and there have given rise to the Schneewittchen group of stories. I am not concerned at present to prove or disprove this last contention. I may point out, however, that the German tale contains elements, such as the seven dwarfs, which have all the appearance of great antiquity, and that the material and social conditions postulated by the tale must have existed in German as well as in Celtic lands. I trust some member of the Society with more leisure than
^ Prudentius tells the story of St. Eulalia ; late hagiologists, of St. Mary the Egyptian, for which the oldest Acts of that saint give no ■warrant.
Eliduc and Little Snow-White. 47
T can command will carefully analyse and compare all known versions of this folk-tale group, and will essay to determine whether the facts compel us to assume radiation from a particular centre within historic times, or allow us to regard the tale as common property of the various Aryan races.
In any case we have here a most beautiful illustration of the theory I have always urged, viz., that the folk-tale as collected in modern Europe is substantially older than the romances which were written down in the Middle Ages ; that so far from being abridged and debased derivations from the romances, they are, in the main, derived from the tales upon which those romances were based ; that there existed among the various Aryan-speaking races, as far back as we can trace, a stock of mythic narratives which have lived on to the present day.
No one at all familiar, I will not say with the methods of folk-lore research — these methods are and must be those of historical criticism generally — but with the facts dis- closed by that research, but readily admits that, whilst we must always take the earliest version as the starting-point of investigation we must steel ourselves against the presump- tion that this earliest version is necessarily the starting- point of the series of phenomena we are investigating. It may be so, but more frequently it is not. This view is, however, apparently unintelligible to those distinguished students of history or literary history who sometimes do folk-lorists the honour of noticing them, and is held by them to be the result of the uncritical spirit which per- vades all folk-lore study. The boot is really on the other leg. It is the non-folk-lorist who is uncritical in applying critical canons, perfectly sound it may be in his own line of study, to another with which he is not familiar, and to which they are not legitimately applicable. It is not often, however, that a principle so important to folk-lore research as that of the capacity of contemporary tradition to pre- serve facts which are, using the word in a strict sense, pre-
48 Eliduc and Little Snow- White.
historic, can be proved. Hence the value of the instance I have just examined.
Another lesson that may be learnt from this instance is the invalidity of an argument dear to many students of history, the argument ex silentio. I believe that even in historical investigation proper a most unwarranted use is often made of this argument ; in folk-lore research it should never be used save with the utmost caution. Could we apply a universal phonograph to the entirety of living oral tradition we should even then be far from justified in dogmatising about what may or may not have taken place formerly. But, as every folk-lorist well knows, it is but fragments of tradition that have been recorded and pub- lished. Every now and then a fresh fragment comes to light, and, like the Gaelic mdrcJien of Gold-tree, opens up new lines of investigation, and compels us to seek in new directions for the solution of our problems.
Note. — The birth-story of Aed Slane has been edited and translated by Professor Windisch {Ber. d. phil.-hist. Classe d. Kg. Sachs. Ges. d. JViss., 1884). The best edition of Marie's /ais is that of K. Warnke (1885), with storiological notes by D. R. Kohler. For those un- familiar with old French, Roquefort's edition of Marie's works, with, modern French version, may be recommended.
Alfred Nutt.
MAGIC SONGS OF THE FINNS. IV.
XXXIV. — Origin of the Earth -Goblin (Skin Eruption).^
{a.)
A RASH iinaahijieji) is from the earth by birth, a red spot upon the skin is from the courtyard, from the animosity of the earth or of the water, or from hidden poison of a frog. From this the cunning one has been brought forth, the deceitful one of the earth has been bred ; although I do not the least know how it should have come here, how it should have broken out on a human skin, on the body of a woman's son ; to burn it like fire, to scorch it like flame, or as a * snail' or a ' worm', or as some other earth-goblin would do. A worm has short legs, an earth-goblin's are still shorter. If thou hast risen from the earth, then I conjure thee into the earth. If, feeble one, thou hast issued from water, then tumble into the water. If thou hast issued from fire, then plunge into the fire. When thou art departing carry away thine ani- mosity, take away thine own mischief
A water Hiisi rowed along, a young creature kept see- sawing in a copper boat with tin oars. He reached land
* Maahinen, see Gastrin, Vorlesiingen iiber d. Finn. Mythologies, p. 169. The remainder of these magic songs will be given in prose. vVords in single inverted commas are epithets, and not to he taken quite literally.
VOL. III. E
50 Magic Songs of the Finns.
like a strawberry/ tumbled down like a lump of wheaten dough. Hence arose the breed of earth-goblins, hence hast thou, deceitful wretch, originated. Now I conjure thee away. There is no place for thee here ; thy place, earth-goblin, is in the earth ; thy place, water-devil, is in. the water.
XXXV. — Origin of Stitch and Pleurisy. {a)
Formerly a lovely oak grew, an incomparable shoot shot up. It grew extremely high, sought to touch the sky with its head, hindered the clouds from moving, the fleecy clouds from scudding, and darkened half the sun, be- dimmed a third of the earth.
The young men deliberate, the middle-aged ponder how they can live without the moon, how exist without the sun in these wretched borderlands, these miserable northern lands.
They needed someone to fell, to lay low the mischievous oak. They searched and found none, they sought and discovered no one. Among this people in our land, among the fully-grown, among the crowd of men, there was none to lay low the mischievous oak, to fell the straight and lofty tree.
A swarthy fellow emerged from the sea, a full-grown man from the surge, neither great nor small, but a full- grown man of medium size, as tall as a straightened thumb \yar. as thick as a summer gadfly], the height of three fingers \y. of an ox-hoof] ; on his shoulder lay an ornamented axe with an ornamented haft ; on his head he wore a tall hat of flagstone, on his feet shoes of stone. Well, that man had a mind to fell the oak, to shatter the hellish {i-utwion) tree.^
1 Red in the face like a strawberry from the exertion, but with allusion to the redness of rash and other such skin-diseases.
2 See note 4, Folk-Lore, i, No. 3, p. 339.
Magic So7igs of the Finns. • 51
He advances with tripping gait, approaches with de- liberate steps, advanced to the foot of the tree to break down the huge oak. He struck the tree with his axe, dealt it a blow with its level edge. He struck once, twice, and a third time struck a blow. Fire spirted from the axe, flame escaped from the oak.
Some chips of the tree whirled down suddenly, some fragments suddenly came wobbling down upon a nameless meadow, upon a land without a knoll. Other chips scattered, widely dispersed themselves upon the clear and open sea, upon the wide and open main.
Just at the third stroke he cut through the oak, broke the hellish tree, suddenly overturned the thriving tree, so that the root-end gaped towards the east and the branching head fell towards the west across the Pohjola river to serve as an eternal bridge for any traveller to pass to gloomy Pohjola.
A chip that had wobbled down, that had been flung on the waters of the sea, upon the clear and open main, upon the illimitable waves, did the wind rock to and fro, did the restless ocean toss about. A wave wafted it ashore, the breakers of the sea steered it into a nameless bay, into one unknown by name, where the Hiisi folk reside, where the evil people hold their sales.
Hiisi's iron-toothed dog, that ever runs along the shore, chanced to be coursing on the beach, making the gravel rattle. He spied the chip in the waves, snapped it up and carried it to a maiden's hands, to the finger-tips of Hiisi's damsel.
The maiden looks at it, turns it over, and pronounced the following words : " Something might come of it if it were in the smithy of a smith, in the hands of a craftsman. From it a wizard might get arrows, an archer many in- struments."
A fiend chanced to overhear, an evil one to observe her. The evil one carried the chip to a smithy, makes arrows, prepares blunt-headed arrows of it to become stitch and
E 2
52 Magic Songs of the Finns.
pleurisy in men, sudden sickness in horses, ' sharp spikes in cattle.
The devil makes arrows, sharpens spikes inside a steely mountain, a rock of iron. He made a little pile of shafts, a heap of heavy arrows inside a doorless, windowless smithy. He makes the heads of steel, turns the shafts out of wood from a bough of the ' fiery' oak, from a sharp spike of the red^ tree. He smoothed his arrows and feathered them with the small plumes of a swallow, with the tail- feathers of a brindled bird. Whence did he get the bind- ing thread ? He obtained the binding thread from the locks of Hiisi's damsel, from the hair of a melancholy creature. After feathering the arrows, with what were they encrusted ? With the poison of a viper, with the venom of a black snake. Then he selected his best bow and attached a string to it made from a wanton stallion's tail, from the hair of a full-grown animal.
He seized the ' fiery' bow, stretched the * fiery' cross- bow against his left knee, under his right foot. He took the swiftest arrow, selected the best shaft, straightened the ' fiery' crossbow against his right shoulder, and shot the first arrow aloft above his head into the azure sky, into a long bank of cloud. The sky was like to split, the aerial vault to break, portions of the air to rend, the aerial canopy to bend at the anguish caused by the ' fiery' arrow, by the sharp spike of Aijo's son. The arrow receded where naught was ever heard of it again.
Then he shot a second arrow into the earth below his feet. The earth was like to go to Mana \y. to ignite], the hills to powder into mould, the sandy ridges to split, the sandy heaths to break in two from the anguish caused by the * fiery' arrow, from the burning pain caused by the red wood. That arrow constantly receded where naught was ever heard of it again.
1 Further on, in § (<:), the oak is called the murderous tree, so pos- sibly ' red' means the blood-stained tree, alluding to the bloody work effected by the arrows made from it. ' Fiery' = terrible.
Magic Songs of the Finns. 53
Immediately he shot a third, a final and malignant arrow, across land and swamp, across deep gloomy forests against a steely \y. silver] mountain, against an iron \y. stony] rock. The arrow rebounded from the stone, recoiled against the rock, and entered a human skin, the body of a wretched man.
Such a shaft may be extricated, such an arrow with- drawn always by virtue of the word of God, through the Lord's grace.
Of old a lovely oak grew, a flourishing sapling uprose on the shoulder of a sandy ridge, on the crest of a golden hillock. Its boughs were somewhat bushy, its foliage somewhat ample. Its branching head reached the sky, its leafy boughs spread through the air, concealed the rays of the sun, obscured the rays of the moon, prevented the Great Bear from stretching and the stars of heaven from moving.
A shiver comes over cattle, a horror over fish in the water, a strangeness over birds of the air, and weariness over human beings, for the dear sun no longer shines, nor does the moonshine diffuse light upon these wretched ones, these unfortunates.
They searched for a man, sought for such an one that could break down the oak, fell the splendid lofty tree, prostrate the lively tree, clear away the hellish {rutimon) tree. None was found to clear away, to smash the brittle tree to bits. There was no strong doughty man in our own land, in pleasant Finland, in beautiful Karelia to do this ; nor did one come from further afield, from daring Sweden, from weak Russia, nor from the disputed ground of this realm, that could fell the oak, fracture the hellish tree, prostrate the hundred-headed oak.
A \y. small, v. black, v. old, v. iron] man emerged from the sea, a full-grown man uprose from the waves. He was not very large nor very small ; his height was quarter-ell
54 Magic Songs of the Finns.
\v. an ell], a woman's span ; he could lie down under a bowl, stand under a sieve. His hair reached down behind to his heels, his beard descended in front to his knees. On his nape was an iron hat, on his feet were iron boots, on his arms were iron sleeves, on his mitts was iron embroidery ; an iron belt begirt his waist, behind the belt was an iron axe provided with an iron haft, at the end of which was an iron knob.
He sharpens his axe, whetted its level edge on a rock of iron, on a mountain tipped with steel, on five Esthonian whetstones, on six whetstones, on the sides of seven hones, on eight surfaces ; by night he grinds the axe, by day he fashions the haft.
By degrees the axe became sharpened, the haft was gradually fashioned. Already a full-grown man had be- come full grown, the man had begun to be a man. His foot moves proudly on the ground, his head touches the clouds, the bristles of his beard shone like a leafy grove upon a slope, his hair shook about like a clump of pines upon a hill.
He advances with tripping step, approaches with un- steady gait, clad in wide breeches, a fathom wide at the foot, one-and-half at the knee, and two fathoms at the hips. Once and again he stepped, making an effort to approach the oak. One foot he stamped down upon a spot of yielding sand, with the other he trod upon the liver- coloured earth. Already with the third stride he reached the roots of the oak, the barbs and endless torments of the red tree.
He struck firmly with his level-edged axe against the oak ; from the tree's side a chip flew off, an outside chip splintered off which the wind carried to the great open sea to serve as a boat for Vainamoinen, as wood for the singer's skiff. Once and again he struck a blow, nor was it long before he felled the oak tree to the ground with its crown towards the south, the root-end towards the north-east inclining due north.
Magic Songs of the Finns. 55
He contemplates the chips on the spot where the red tree was felled, where the wide spreading oak lay, and thus expressed himself in words : " One might get useful wood from these branches of the level-headed oak. Whoever takes a branch has obtained eternal luck, whoever severs a (heavy bough has severed an eternal power to inspire love, whoever breaks off a topmost branch has broken off eternal magic skill."
The chips that had scattered, the splinters that fell in such a way as to be drifted about on the clear open main, were driven by a wave, were tossed by the ocean-swell, were jolted by a gust of wind, were floated ashore by the water to the end of a long promontory \y. to Tuoni's black river] to the beach of an evil pagan.
Hiisi's tiny little lass, a woman of fair complexion, was Avashing dirty linen, besprinkling ragged clouts at the end of a long gangway, on the top of a great landing-stage. She seized the chips, split them into splinters, cut them into chips for cow-litter, gathered them into her wallet, carried them in her long thonged wallet to the courtyard at home. Here she snatched up the chips in her pouch and upsets them about the house.
Three of her brothers are at home, who interrogate her about this : " What might a wizard get from these, what would an €i{-sm\\kv {Keito) hammer out?" The maiden thus expressed herself: "A craftsman will get something, a man of skill will forge something, a wizard will obtain wood for arrows, Lempo will get leaf-headed spears and Sudden Death pleurisies."
Hiisi \y. the devil] chanced to overhear, an evil one to observe this. He sent his son to a smithy to hammer out arrowheads, to forge spears. The laddie went to the smithy, makes arrows, hammers out blunt arrowheads, prepared a little pile of bolts, a heap of heavy arrows. He forged a dozen pikes, made a bundle of spears from the branches of the ' fiery' oak, from the hard spikes of the red tree. He made them neither great nor small, he made
56 Magic Songs of the Finns.
the spears of medium size, with which he stabbed a hundred men, kept pricking a thousand.
The devil took up his pricking-tools, Keito seized the spear, kept brandishing his spears, launched angrily his sharp spikes, which come as stitch and pleurisy to men, as sudden sickness to kine. Hiisi cares nothing where he has shot his arrows, whether into a beast with horns, or into a neighing horse, or else into a human skin, into the body of a woman's son.
Formerly a great oak grew, a sapling without a blemish sprang up. The oak was of an evil sort, with its broad head it hid the sun, encompassed the moon with its foliage, the Great Bear with its branches.
To live without light is hard and wearisome for human beings, when the sun never shines, when there is no moon- shine. No man, no mother's son came forward of the rising generation, or indeed of the old men, that could fell the oak, could break down the murderous tree. There was none in our native land, in these wretched border- lands between the two Karelias, a land disputed by three kingdoms.
They made a search through the country in five parishes, in six church districts. But as no one was found they made inquiry in heaven. An old man came from heaven to all appearance fit. His chest was a fathom wide, the hat he wore was a fathom wide, the drawers upon his legs were two fathoms wide. On his shoulder rested a golden axe with a golden handle, at the end of which was a silver knob.
He looks about him, turning here and there. With one foot he stepped to the edge of a willow-bush, with the other he advanced to the root of the sappy oak. He hacked the sappy oak, kept slashing at the level-topped tree, strikes off the top eastwards, casts the root-end north- westwards. Every chip of it that he cut off became a water-lily leaf, every branch that he strewed around got
Magic Songs of the Finns. 57
lost in the sea, to be drifted by waves, dashed about by the breakers.
A cur dog of the shore appeared, one that used to run by the riverside. It ran from stone to stone, it sprang from one fir branch to another, saw something black upon the sea, picked it up, and gave it into an elf-smith's {Keito) hands, into the fingers of a hideous man. The elf-smith grasped it in his hands, looked at it, turned it^over : " Why, arrows might be made of this, blunt-headed arrows might be fashioned."
He smoothed a pile of shafts, a heap of triply-plumed arrows out of what had been broken off the oak, had been splintered off the brittle tree. Each one that he finished his sons feathered with the tiny plumes of a bullfinch, with the feathers of a sparrow's wing, with the bristles of a boar, with the shaggy down of a spider.
The evil one has three sons, one a cripple, the second lame, and the third stone-blind. The cripple strings the bow, the lame one holds the arrows, the stone-blind one shoots. The cripple strung the bow and gave it into the archer's hand. The stone-blind archer makes trial of his arrows near swamps and solid ground, near long farmyards. He shot a singly-feathered arrow aloft into the sky, into the oozy clouds, into the swirling, fleecy clouds. The sky shattered into holes, the atmosphere into apertures. He himself uttered these words : " The arrow has whizzed somewhere whence it will never return, nor is that by any means specially desired."
He shot a doubly-feathered arrow into the ground below his feet. The earth below suddenly splits, its mould instantaneously fissures, all at once strong boulder-stones give a crash, and stones upon the shore rend. The arrow whizzed somewhere whence it will never return.
He shot a triply-feathered arrow at the hill of Pohjola \v. Hiitola], against the lofty mountain, against the wooded \v. iron] hill. He shot so that it deflected from the stone, glanced sideways off the rock, rebounded from the stone.
58 Magic Songs of the Finns.
recoiled from the rock. Then it wanted to strike animals, to enter a human skin, the body of a woman's son ; but there is no place for it there whence it may return.
A ' fiery' oak grew on a ' fiery' plain. A boy came from Pohjola, a full-grown man from the cold village, trailing behind a small hand-sledge on which lies a little .axe with a haft an ell long, with an edge a span high ; the edge is new, the haft old. On his hands he wears new gloves worked with old embroidery. With his hands he began to batter the ' fiery' tree, to smash the ' sparkling' •oak. He hewed it into splinters, cut it into chips, into litter for cows. A wind carried them to sea to be drifted by the sea waves to Tuoni's dark river, to the under- lake of Manala. From them a wizard gets arrows, a devil pricking instruments.
The devil manufactures arrows, Lempo leaf-headed spears from branches of the ' fiery' oak, from splinters of the evil tree in a doorless, windowless smithy. An arrow from the devil, a leaf-headed spear from Lempo whizzed into a wretched human being's skin, into the body of one born of a woman.
(^■)
Udutar (daughter of Mist), Nature's daughter, Terhetar (d. of Fog), the sharp girl sifted mist with a sieve, kept scattering fog at the end of a misty promontory, at the extremity of a foggy island ; from which circumstance burning pains have their origin, burning pains and pleurisies, in a naked skin, in a body racked with pain.
XXXVI. — Swelling on the Neck.
Strange swelling ! Lempo's lump ! I know your family, from what, excrescence ! you originated, from what, horror •of the land ! you were bred, out of what, ' whorl of Lempo !' you were spun, out of what, ball of Lempo ! you swelled
Magic Songs of the Finns. 59
up on the place where breath is breathed, on the narrow muscles of the neck. Your family is from the mist/ your mother is from the mist, your father from the mist, your ancestor is from it, your five brothers are there, the six •daughters of your godfather, your paternal uncle's seven children. Pray remove yourself to nameless meadows unknown by name.
XXXVII. — The Origin of the Tooth-Worm.
(^.)
You fidgety, globular being ! the size of a seed of flax, looking like a flax-seed, that destroys the teeth, keeps •cutting the jaw-bones, I know, indeed, your family, and all your up-bringing. A black [i-. iron] man emerged from the sea, from the waves uprose a full-grown man, the height of a straightened thumb, the stature of a man's finger. A single hair comes wafted by the wind. A beard :grew from the hair, and on the beard was engendered a worm. Owing to this the low wretch came, the evil pagan removed into the beloved jaw-bones, the dearly- cherished teeth, to devour and gnaw, to crunch, rasp, and play havoc with the jaws, and hack the teeth.
There now is your family, there is your likeness.
{b.)
A furious old quean \ik Vainamoinen's old wife], the stout woman Luonnotar [t-. sturdy old Vainamoinen], set to work to sweep the sea, to mop the billows with a broom, wearing on her head a textile of sparks, with a cloak of foam over her shoulders. She swept a whole day, swept the next day, forthwith swept a third whole day. The refuse gathered in her broom, in her copper besom. She was anxious to remove it, so she raised the besom from the waves, made the copper handle twirl high above her 1 Or, " from Sumu'', regarding it as a place-name.
6o Magic Songs of the Finns.
head. The refuse stuck fast in the besom, so she seized it with her teeth, whereupon an aching pain seized her teeth, a full-grown devil her jaw. Hence that evil one \y. can- nibal] was bred, that biter of bone came to close quarters, that keeps rustling in the jaw-bone, that hacks the teeth, digs into the whole head, and keeps gnawing at the members.
The stout woman Luonnotar, the furious old quean, went to find a broom in a leafy grove, to get material for a besom in a copse. A pin fell from her bosom, a copper pin dropped suddenly, fell rustling into the withered grass, with a jingling noise into the hay. Hence the worm was bred, hence in the dearly-cherished teeth, in the unfortu- nate cheek-bones originated Tuoni's grub that eats bone, bites flesh, and plays havoc with the teeth.
id.) A blind girl of Pohjola, Vainamoinen's old servant-girl, was dusting his small chamber, was sweeping the floor, when a piece of dirt fell from the broom, a twig snapt off the besom upon the swept floor, upon the dusted boards, near the seams of the planks. Hence the devourer origin- ated, hence the gnawer was bred which shot itself into a mouth, then slid down upon the tongue and stumbled forwards to the teeth, in order to feed upon the blood- filled flesh, to rack with pain the blood-filled bones.
The evil house-mistress, Syojatar, iron's old house-mother, Rakehetar (Hailstone's daughter), pulverised grains of iron, hammered steel points upon an iron rock in an alder-wood mortar with a pestle of alder-wood in a room built of alder-wood. She sifted what she had pounded, and gobbled up those 'groats' of hers. Bits went astray among the teeth and settled themselves in the gums, in order to hack the teeth, to rack the jaw-bones with pain.
Magic Songs of the Finns. 6i
A wee man emerged from the sea with a tiny axe in his hand and a little billhook under his arm. He encoun- tered an oak upon the path, a gigantic tree upon the shore. He struck the tree with his axe, dealt it a blow with the level edge. A chip stuck very firmly to the axe. With tooth and nail he tried to detach it. Then the obstruction stuck in his mouth, an aching pain took pos- session of his teeth, a stench diffused itself in his jaws. Hence the great devourer, the evil hacker of the teeth originated.
A fox carried off and crunched a fragment of bone as he ran along between two rocks, along the slopes of five mountains. Hence, indeed, the worm was bred, hence originated Tuoni's grub, that spread itself as far as the jaws, and played havoc with the teeth.
XXXVIII. — The Origin of Cancer and White Swellings.
Cancer was born in Cottage Creek, at the mouth of the Jordan river. Harlots rinsed their linen caps at the mouth of the Jordan. Hence, then, a cancer was bred, hence the bone-biter made its appearance that bites bone, eats flesh, sucks blood raw without its being cooked in a pot, with- out its being heated in a copper. The ' dog' set off to run about, the ' worm' began to crawl ; went to corrupt bone, to macerate flesh, to make it suppurate, to cause it to swell in the shape of boils and white swellings.
XXXIX. — The Origin of Ale.
The origin of ale is known, the first beginning of drink is guessed. The origin of ale is from barley, of the noble
62 Magic Songs of the Finns.
drink from hops, though it is not produced without water nor yet without fire.
Hops, the son of Boisterous {Remunen), was poked, was ploughed into the ground as a small snake, as an ant^ was thrown down at the side of the well of Kaleva, on the un- ploughed edge of Osmo's field. From it a young shoot sprang up, a green tendril uprose, which mounted into a little tree and stretched towards its head.
Osmo's \z>. Luck's] old man sowed barley at the end of Osmo's field. The barley grew splendidly, sprouted most perfectly at the end of Osmo's new field, in the cleared land of the son of Kaleva.
Osmotar the brewer of ale, the woman that brews small beer, took up six grains of barley, seven clusters of hops eight ladlesful of water, put a pot on the fire, and brought the brew to boiling-point. She let the barley ale simmer for a whole summer day. She managed to boil the ale,, but could not get it to ferment.
She reflects and turns over in her mind what she might add to make the ale ferment, to make the small beer work. She saw wild mustard in the ground, rubbed it with both palms, grated it with both hands against her thighs, and rubbed out a golden-breasted martin.
When she obtained it, she exclaimed : " My little martin ! my pet ! go where I command, into the gloomy wilds of a forest where mares are wont to fight, where stallions battle savagely. In your hands let their froth drip, with your hands collect their lather to serve as ferment for the ale, as yeast to make the small beer work."
Thus advised, the obedient martin hurried ofif at full speed, soon had run a long distance, to the gloomy wilds of a forest where mares are wont to fight, where stallions battle savagely. Froth dripped from a mare's mouth,, slaver from a stallion's muzzle, which it brought to the woman's hand, to the shoulder of Osmotar.
^ I.e., possessing the venomous or pungent qualities of a snake of of an ant.
Magic Songs of the Finns. 65.
The woman upset it into her small beer, Osmotar into her ale. The ale became depraved, made men deficient of sense, caused the half-witted to brawl, the fools to play the fool, the children to cry, and other folk to grieve.
The lovely maiden Kalevatar, a girl with neat fingers^. brisk in her movements, ever light of foot, was moving over a seam of the planks, dancing about on the centre of the floor, when she saw a leaf upon the floor and picked it up. She looks at it, turns it over : " What would come of this, in the hands of a lovely woman, in the fingers of a kindly maiden ? "
She placed it in a woman's hands, in the fingers of a kindly miaiden. The woman rubbed it with both her' hands against her thighs, and thereby a bee was born. The bee, the lively bird, flew away at full speed, soon flew a long distance, quickly reduced the intervening space, to an island in the open main, to a skerry in the sea, to a. honey-dripping meadow, to the margin of a honeyed field. A short interval elapsed, a very little time slipped by,, already it returns buzzing, making a mighty fuss, brought virgin honey on its wing, carried honey under its cloak,, which it placed in the woman's hand, in the fingers of the kindly maiden.
Osmotar thrust it into her ale, the woman into her small beer. Then the new drink began to rise, the ruddy ale to work in the new wooden vat, in the two-handled tub of birch. The ale, the extract to be drunk by men, was ready for use.
Hops shouted from a tree ; water whispered from a stream ; barley from the edge of a ploughed field : " When shall we get together, when unite one with the other, at the feast of All-hallows {Kekri), or at Yule, or not till Easter- tide ? 'Tis tedious living alone, 'tis pleasanter in twos and threes."
The kindly maiden, the girl of Pohja [v. Osmotar the
64 Magic Songs of the Finns.
brewer of ale], reflects and ponders : " What would happen were I to bring them together and unite them, causing each one to meet the others ? "
A redstart sang from a tree : " A noble drink would be obtained, good ale would result from them in the hands of a skilful maker, one that rightly understands."
The kindly maiden, the girl of Pohja, plucks clusters of hops, gathered grains of barley, drew water from the eddy of a stream. These she united, intermingled one with the other, and intended to brew in a new two-handled tub of birch. Stones were heated for a month, a forest of trees was burnt, water was boiled a whole summer \y. a sea of water was boiled], ale was brewed for a whole winter. A wagtail \v. titmouse] fetched water, a bee brought honey to make the new drink ferment. Owing to that the new drink fermented in the two-handled tub of birch, foamed up to a level with the handles, bubbled above the rim, was like to splutter on the ground, to fall upon the floor. Hence the violent one was known, was judged, was supposed at the proper time to pour upon the earth for the benefit of the earth before it became great.
The kindly maiden, the girl of Pohja, gave utterance to words : " How unlucky I am ! alas my thoughtless deeds ! for 1 have brewed bad ale, have produced an intractable small beer. It has swelled up to the handles, it inundates the floor."
A redstart sang from a tree, a thrush from the eaves : " It does not pertain to poor living, 'tis a drink that pertains to good living, that should be emptied into tuns, trans- ported into cellars in oaken barrels, in butts with copper hoops."
Small Beer expressed himself cleverly, took up the word and said : " 'Tis bad to live inside a half-tun behind a copper tap. If you do not provide singers, do not invite merry ones, I will spirt out foaming from the barrel, will escape from the half-tun, will kick the half-tun into two, will bang the bottom out with blows, will move to another farmhouse,
Magic Songs of the Finns. 65
to the neighbour's over the fence where people drink with jollity and roar with merriment."
Such was the beginning and origin of ale. From what did it obtain its good name, its famous reputation ? A cat called out from the stove, a puss from the end of a bench exclaimed : '* If this pertains to good living {Jiyvd-oloinen) may its name be ale {olut)."
Hence ale obtained its name,^ its famous reputation, as it pertained to good living, was a good drink for the tem- perate, gave laughing mouths to women, a cheery mind to men, caused the temperate to be merry, the boisterous to stagger \y, fight].
The late Professer Ahlqvist- gives a Mordvin example of " the origin of ale", which is short enough to tran- scribe.
" Where does hops originate, where does hops grow ? It originates in a damp spot, in a willow copse, its seed is a white pearl. The wind blew, puffed it. Whither, whither did it puff it ? To the bank of a river, into a cook-house it puffed it, in the cook-house they are brewing ale. It puffed it to the edge of a vat, where it began speaking with the rye : ' Mother Rye, Mother Rye, allow us who are speechless to begin to speak, us who do not fight to begin to fight, us who do not dance to begin to dance.' "
XL. — The Origin of Brandy.
From what has brandy originated, from what has the lovely drink grown ? Brandy has been brought forth, the lovely drink has been produced from the beards of young
^ An example of popular etymology. The word for ale, olut, dimi- nutive olonen, is erroneously supposed to be derived from olotnen, living, existent.
' Muistelmia Matkoilta Vencijcilld, p. i66.
VOL. III. F
66 Magic Songs of the Finns.
barley, from the bristly heads of green corn, but it is not produced without water, not yet without a raging fire. Water caused it to be lively, fire made it raging.
John Abercromby.
( To be continued.)
GUARDIAN SPIRITS OF WELLS AND LOCHS.
THE following beliefs regarding Guardian Spirits of Wells and Lochs were collected in Strathdon and Corgarff, Aberdeenshire, by the help of Mr. William Michie Farmer, Coull of Newe, and Mr. James Farquharson, Corgarff. Distance from libraries and want of books of reference have prevented me from quoting similar beliefs among other nations and tribes except in the very slightest way. I have contented myself with merely stating the beliefs.
Tobar-fuar-m6r, i.e., The Big Cold Well.
This well is situated at the bottom of a steep hill in a fork between two small streams on the estate of Allargue, Corgarff There are three springs that supply the water, distant from each other about a yard. The well is circular, with a diameter of about twelve feet. The sides are about five or six feet deep, with an opening on the lower side through which the water flows out.
The water running from these springs is of great virtue in curing diseases — each spring curing a disease. One spring cured blindness, another cured deafness, and the third lameness. The springs were guarded by a Spirit that lived under a large stone, called " The Kettle Stone", which lay between two of the springs. No cure was effected unless gold was presented to the Spirit, which she placed in a kettle below the stone. Hence its name of "Kettle Stone". If one tried to rob the Spirit, death, by some terrible accident, soon followed. My informant, James Farquharson, more than fifty years ago, when a lad
F 2
68 Guardian Spirits of Wells and Lochs.
resolved to remove the " Kettle Stone" from its position, and so become possessor of the Spirit's gold. He accord- ingly set out with a few companions, all provided with picks and spades, to displace the stone. After a good deal of hard labour the stone was moved from its site, but no kettle-full of gold was found.
An old woman met the lads on their way to their homes, and when she learnt what they had been doing she assured them they would all die within a few weeks, and that a terrible death would befall the ringleader.
TOBAR-NA-GLAS A COILLE, i.e., ThE WeLL IN THE
Grey Wood.
This well lies near the old military road, near the top of the hill that divides the glen of Corgarff from Glengairn. In a small knoll near it lived a spiteful Spirit that went by the name of Duine-glase-beg, i.e., the Little Grey Man. He was guardian of the well and watched over its water with great care. Each one on taking a draught of water from it had to drop into it a pin or other piece of metal. If this was not done, and if at any time afterwards the same person attempted to draw water from it, the Spirit resisted, annoyed, and hunted the unfortunate till death by thirst came. My informant has seen the bottom of the well strewed with pins. Last autumn (1891), I gathered several pins from it.
The Bride's Well.
This well was at one time the favourite resort of all brides for miles around. On the evening before the marriage the bride, accompanied by her maidens, went " atween the sun an the sky" to it. The maidens bathed her feet and the upper part of her body with water drawn from it. This bathing ensured a family. The bride put into the well a few crumbs of bread and cheese, to keep her children from ever being in want.
Guardian Spirits of Wells and Lochs. 69
ToBAR Vacher.
This is a fine well, dedicated to St. Machar, near the present farm of Corriehoul, Corgarff, Strathdon. A Roman Catholic chapel was at one time near it, and the present graveyard occupies the site of the chapel. This well was renowned for the cures it wrought in more than one kind of disease. To secure a cure the ailing one had to leave a silver coin in it. Once there was a famine in the district, and not a few were dying of hunger. The priest's house stood not far from the well. One day, during the famine, his housekeeper came to him and told him that their stock of food was exhausted, and that there was no more to be got in the district. The priest left the house, went to the well, and cried to St. Machar for help. On his return he told the servant to go to the well the next morning at sunrise, walk three times round it, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, without looking into it, and draw from it a draught of water for him. She carried out the request. On stooping down to draw the water she saw three fine salmon swimming in the well. They were caught, and served the two as food till supply came to the famine- stricken district from other quarters.
Ben Newe Well.
There is a big rugged rock on the top of Ben Newe in Strathdon, Aberdeenshire, On the north side of this rock, under a projection, there is a small circular-shaped hollow which always contains water. Everyone that goes to the top of the hill must put some small object into it, and then take a draught of water off it. Unless this is done the traveller will not reach in life the foot of the hill. I climbed the hill in June of 1890, and saw in the well several pins, a small bone, a pill-box, a piece of a flower, and a few other objects.
70 Guardian Spirits of Wells a^id Lochs.
In Roumania each spring is supposed to be presided over by a Spirit called Wodna zena or zofia. When a Roumanian woman draws water she spills a few drops to do homage to this Spirit. — TJie Land beyond the Forest, vol. ii, p. 8, by E. Gerard (1888, Edinburgh).
LOCHAN-NAN-DEAAN.
This is a small loch on the side of the old military road between Gorgarff and Tomintoul. The road passes close by its brink on the west side. On the other side of the road is an almost perpendicular rock, between 400 and 500 feet high. On the opposite side of the loch rises a very steep hill to the height of about 1,000 feet. The road in a snow-storm and after nightfall is very dangerous, and tradition has it that many travellers have lost their lives in the loch, and that their bodies were never recovered. It was believed to be bottomless, and to be the abode of a Water-Spirit that delighted in human sacrifice.
Notwithstanding this bloodthirsty Spirit, the men of Strathdon and Gorgarff resolved to try to draw the water from the loch in hope of finding the remains of those that had perished in it. On a fixed day a number of them met, with spades and picks to cut a way for the outflow of the water through the road. When all were ready to begin work, a terrific yell came from the loch, and there arose from its waters a diminutive creature in shape of a man with a red cap on his head. The men fled in terror, leaving their picks and spades behind them. The Spirit seized them and threw them into the loch. Then, with a gesture of defiance at the fleeing men, and a roar that shook the hills, he plunged into the loch and disappeared amidst the water that boiled and heaved as red as blood.
LocHAN-WAN, i.e., Lambs' Loch. Lochan-wan is a small loch, in a fine grazing district, lying on the upper confines of Aberdeen and Banffshire.
Guardian Spirits of Wells and Lochs. 7 1
When the following took place the grazing ground was common, and the tenants that lived adjoining it had each the privilege of pasturing a certain number of sheep on it. Each one that sent sheep to this common had to offer in sacrifice to the Spirit of the loch the first lamb of his flock dropped on the common. The omission of this sacrifice brought disaster, for, unless the sacrifice was made, half of his flock would be drowned before the end of the grazing season.
An attempt was at one time made to draw the water from the loch, and so dry it, that the burden of the yearly- sacrifice might be got quit of A number of men met and began to cut an outlet for the water. They wrought all day without hindrance, and, when night came, they re- tired. On returning next morning they found that their work of the day before had been all undone during night. Again they busily applied their tools, and did a good day's work. This day's work was again undone during night. The third day was again spent in hard toil, but it was re- solved to watch during the night how it was that the work carried out during each day was undone at night. A watch was accordingly set. At the hour of midnight there rose from the loch hundreds of small black creatures, each carrying a spade. They immediately fell to work on what the men had done during the day, and, in the course of a few minutes, filled up the trench that they had dug three times before. The grazing common is now a deer-forest, and so the Lambs' Loch no longer needs the sacrifice of lambs.
Loch Leetie.
This is a loch in Nairnshire. It was the common belief that a bull lived in it. He was often heard roaring very loudly, particulariy during frost. (Told by Mrs. Miller.)
At one time there lived near the Linn of Dee, in Mar Forest, a man named Farquharson-na-cat, i.e., Farquharson of the wand. He got this name from the fact that his
72 Guardian Spirits of Wells and Lochs.
trade was that of making baskets, sculls, etc. One night he had to cross the river just a little above the linn. In doing so he lost his footing, was carried into the gorge of the linn, and drowned in sight of his wife. Search was made at once for the body, but in vain. Next day the pool below the linn, as well as the river further down, was searched, but the body was not found. That evening the widow took her late husband's plaid and went to the pool below the linn, " atween the sun and the sky". She folded the plaid in a particular way, knelt down on the bank of the pool, and prayed to the Spirit of the pool to give up the body of her drowned husband. She then threw the plaid into the pool, uttering the words, " Take that and give me back my dead." Next morning the dead body, wrapped in the plaid, was found lying on the bank of the pool. Tradition has it that the widow soon afterwards bore a son, and that that son was the progenitor of the Farquharson Clan.
The river Spey is spoken of as " she", and bears the character of being " bloodthirsty". The common belief is that " she" must have at least one victim yearly.
The rhyme about the rivers Dee and Don and their victims is :
" Bloodthirsty Dee, Each year needs three ; But bonny Don, She needs none."
The Roumanians believe that in the vicinity of deep pools of water, more especially whirlpools, there resides the baleur or wodna viuz — the cruel waterman who lies in wait for human victims. {The Land beyond the Forest, by E. Gerard, vol. ii, p. 9.)
Mr. A. Oldfield, in his account of TJie Aborigines of Australia, says that the natives believe that every deep muddy pool is inhabited by a Spirit called In-gnas, whose
Guardian Spirits of Wells and Lochs. 73
powers for mischief seem particularly active during night. Some such pools they will not enter for any consideration, even in broad daylight. ( Transactions of the Ethnological Society, vol. iii, pp. 238, 239. New Series.) See Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (3rd edition), vol. i, pp. 549-567.
W. Gregor.
MANX FOLK-LORE AND SUPERSTITIONS.
II.
IN my previous paper I made allusion to several wells of greater or less celebrity in the Island ; but I find that I have a few remarks to add. Mr. Arthur Moore, in his book on Manx Surnames and Place-Names, p. 200, men- tions a Chibber Unjin, which means the Well of the Ash- tree, and he states that there grew near it " formerly a sacred ash-tree, where votive offerings were hung". The ash-tree calls to his mind Scandinavian legends respecting the ash, but in any case one may suppose the ash was not the usual tree to expect by a well in the Isle of Man^ otherwise this one would scarcely have been distinguished as the Ash-tree Well. The tree to expect by a sacred well is doubtless some kind of thorn, as in the case of Chibber Undin in the parish of Malew. The name means Foundation Well, so called in reference probably to the foundations of an ancient cell, or keeill as it is called in Manx, which lie close by, and are found to measure 2 1 feet long by 12 feet broad. The following is Mr. Moore's account of the well in his book already cited, p. 181 • " The water of this well is supposed to have curative properties. The patients who came to it, took a mouthful of water, retaining it in their mouths till they had twice walked round the well. They then took a piece of cloth from a garment which they had worn, wetted it with the water from the well, and hung it on the hawthorn-tree which grew there. When the cloth had rotted away, the cure was supposed to be effected."
Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions. 75
I visited the spot a few years ago in the company of the Rev. E. B. Savage of St. Thomas's Parsonage, Douglas, and we found the well nearly dried up in consequence of the drainage of the field around it ; but the remains of the old cell were there, and the thorn-bush had strips of cloth or calico tied to its branches. We cut off one, which is now in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. The account Mr. Savage had of the ritual observed at the well differed a little from that given by Mr. Moore, especially in the fact that it made the patient who had been walking round the well with water from the well in his mouth, empty that water finally into a rag from his clothing : the rag was then tied to a branch of the thorn. It does not appear that the kind of tree mattered much ; nay, a tree was not, it seems to me, essential. At any rate, St. Maughold's Well has no tree growing near it now ; but it is right to say, that when Mr. Kermode and I visited it, we could find no rags left near the spot, nor indeed could we expect to find any, as there was nothing to which they might be tied on that windy headland. The absence of the tree does not, however, prove that the same sort of ritual was not formerly observed at St. Maughold's Well as at Chibber Undin ; and here I must mention another well which 1 have visited in the Island more than once. It is on the side of Bradda Hill, a little above the village of Bradda, and in the direction of Fleshwick : I was attracted to it by the fact that it had, as I had been told by Mr. Savage, near it formerly an old cell or kceill, and the name of the saint to which it belonged may probably be gathered from the name of the well, which, in the Manx of the south of the Island, is Chibbyrt Valtane, pronounced approximately Chilvurt Valtane or AlSane. The personal name would be written in modern Manx in its radical form as Baltane, and if it occurred in the genitive in old inscriptions I should expect to find it written Baltagni. It is, however, un- known to me, but to be placed by the side of the name of the saint after whom the parish of Santon is called in the
76 Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions.
south-east of the island. This is pronounced in Manx approximately^ Santane or San'Sane,and would have yielded an early inscriptional nominative Sanctagnus, which, in fact, occurs on an old stone near Llandudno on the oppo- site coast : see Rhys's Lectures on Welsh Philology, p. 371^. To return to the well, it would seem to have been asso- ciated with an old cell, but it has no tree growing by it. Mr. Savage and I were told, nevertheless, that a boy who had searched a short time previously had got some coins out of it, quite recent ones, consisting of halfpennies or pennies, so far as I remember. On my observing to one of the neighbours that I saw no rags there, I was assured that there had been some ; and, on my further saying that I saw no tree there to which they could be tied, I was told that they used to be attached to the brambles, which grew there in great abundance. Thus it appears to me that, in the Isle of Man at any rate, a tree to bear the rags was not an essential adjunct of a holy well.
There is another point to which I should like to call attention, namely, the habit of writing about the rags as offerings, which they are not in all cases. The offerings are the coins, beads, buttons, or pins thrown into the well, or placed in a receptacle for the purpose close to the well. The rags may belong to quite a different order of things : they may be the vehicles of the diseases which the patients communicate to them when they spit out the well-water from their mouths. The rags are put up to rot, so that the disease supposed to cling to them may also die ; and so far is this believed to be the case, that anyone who carries away one of the rags may expect to
^ I say 'approximately', as, more strictly speaking, the ordinary pronunciation is Snfiaen, almost as one syllable, and from this arises a variant, which is sometimes written Siotidatte, while the latest English development, regardless of the accentuation of the Anglo- Manx form Santon (pronounced Sdntn), makes the parish into a St. Ann's ! For the evidence that it was the parish of a St. Sanctan (or Sanctagnus\ see Moore's Siir)ia7nes, p. 209.
Manx Folk-lore and Super stitio7is. jj
attract the disease communicated to it by the one who left it near the holy well. So it is highly desirable that the distinction between the ofiferings and the accursed things should be observed, at any rate in writing of holy wells in the Isle of Man. How far the same distinction is to be found elsewhere I am unable to say ; but the question is one which deserves attention.
From the less known saints Baltane and Santane I wish to pass to the mention of a more famous one, namely, St. Catherine, and this because of a fair called after her, and held on the 6th day of December at the village of Colby in the south of the Island. When I heard of this fair in 1888, it was in temporary abeyance on account of a lawsuit respecting the plot of ground on which the fair is wont to be held ; but I was told that it usually began with a procession, in which a live hen is carried about : this is called St. Catherine's hen. The next day the hen is carried about dead and plucked, and a rhyme pronounced at a certain point in the proceeding contemplates the burial of the hen, but whether that ever took place I know not. It runs thus :
" Kiark Catrina marroo : Gows yn kiojie as goyms fiy cassyn, As ver mayd ee fdn thalloo."
" Cathrine's hen is dead : The head take thou and I the feet, And we shall put her under ground."
A man who is found to be not wholly sober after the fair is locally said to have plucked a feather from the hen (Teh er goaill fedjag ass y ddark) ; so it would seem that there must be such a scramble to get at the hen, and to take part in the plucking, that it requires a certain amount of drink to allay the thirst of the over-zealous devotees of St. Catherine. But why should this ceremony be associated with St. Catherine? and what were the
yS Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions.
origin and meaning of it ? These are questions which I should be glad to have expounded by the Society, for I have not had time to consult Mr. Eraser's Golden Bough, in order to see if it gives any close parallel to the proceed- ings of the good people of Colby.
Manx has a word quaail (Irish coinhdhdzl), meaning a * meeting', and from it we have a derivative qiiaaltagh or qtialtagh, meaning, according to Kelly's Dictionary, "the first person or creature one meets going from home", whereby the author probably meant the first person met by one who is going from home. Kelly goes on to add that " this person is of great consequence to the super- stitious, particularly to women the first time they go out after lying-in". Cregeen, in his Dictionary, defines the qualtagh as " the first person met on New Year's Day, or on going on some new work, etc." Before proceeding to give you my notes on the qualtagh of the present day I may as well finish with Cregeen, for he adds the following information : " A company of young lads or men, generally went in old times on what they termed the Qualtagh, at Christmas or New Year's Day, to the houses of their more wealthy neighbours ; some one of the company repeating in an audible voice the following rhyme : —
" Ollick ghennal erriu as blein feer vie, Seihll as slaynt da'n slane lught thie ; Bea as gennallys eu bio ry-cheilley, Shee as graih eddyr mrane as deiney ; Cooid as cowryn, stock as stoyr, Palchey phuddase, as skaddan dy-liooar ; Arran as caashey, eeym as roayrt ; Baase, myr lugh, ayns uhllin ny soalt ; Cadley sauchey tra vees shiu ny Ihie, As feeackle y jargan, nagh bee dy mie."
It may be loosely translated as follows : —
" A merry Christmas, a happy new year, Long life and health to the household here.
Manx Folk-lore and Siiperstitions. 79
Food and mirth to you dwelling together, Peace and love to all, men and women ; Wealth and distinction, stock and store, Potatoes enough, and herrings galore ; Bread and cheese, butter and plenty, Death, like a mouse, in a barn or haggard ; Sleep in safety while down you lie, And the flea's tooth — may it not badly bite."
At present New Year's Day is the time when the qualtagh is of general interest, and in this case he is practically the first person one sees (besides the members of one's own household) on the morning of that day, whether that person meets one out of doors or comes to one's house. The following is what I have learnt by inquiry as to the qualtagh : all are agreed that he must not be a woman or girl, and that he must not be spaagagJi or splay-footed, while a woman from the parish of Marown told me that he must not have red hair. The prevalent belief, however, is that he should be a dark-haired man or boy, and it is of no consequence how rough his appearance may be, pro- vided he be black-haired. However, I was told by one man in Rushen that the qualtagh need not be black- haired : he must be a man or boy. But this less restricted view is not the one held in the central and northern parts of the Island, so far as I could ascertain. An English lady living in the neighbourhood of Castletown told me that her son, whom I know to be, like his mother, a pronounced blond, not being aware what consequences might be asso- ciated with his visit, called at a house in Castletown on the morning of New Year's Day, and he chanced to be the qualtagh. The mistress of the house was horrified, and expressed her anticipation of misfortunes to the English lady ; and as it happened that one of the children of the house died in the course of the year, the English lady has heard of it since. Naturally the association of these events are not pleasant to her ; but, so far as I can remem.ber, they date only some eight or nine years ago.
8o Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions.
The Society may have pubHshed information on this subject, but I am at present utterly ignorant what import- ance the qualtagh may have enjoyed in other parts of the British Isles. As to Wales, I can only recall, that, when I was a very small boy, I used to be sent very early on New Year's morning to call on an old uncle of mine, because, as I was told, I should be certain to receive a calennig or a calendary gift from him, but on no account would my sister be allowed to go, as he would only see a boy on such an occasion as that. I do not recollect anything being said as to the colour of one's hair or the shape of one's foot ; but that sort of negative evidence is of very little value, as the qualtagh was fast passing out of consideration.
The preference here given to a boy over a girl looks like one of the widely-spread superstitions which rule against the fair sex ; but, as to the colour of the hair, I should be predisposed to think that it possibly rests on racial anti- pathy, long ago forgotten ; for it may perhaps be regarded as going back to a time when the dark-haired race reckoned the Aryan of fair complexion as his natural enemy, the very sight of whom brought with it thoughts calculated to make him unhappy and despondent. If this idea prove to be approximately correct, one might suggest that the racial distinction in question referred to the struggles between the inhabitants of Man and their Scandinavian conquerors ; but to my thinking it is just as likely that it goes far further back.
Lastly, what is one to say with regard to the spaagagh or splay-footed person, now more usually defined as flat- footed or having no instep ? I have heard it said in the south of the Island that it is unlucky to meet a spaagagh in the morning at any time of the year, and not on New Year's Day alone ; but this does not help us in the attempt to find the genesis of this belief If it were said that it was unlucky to meet a deformed person, it would look somewhat more natural ; but why fix on the flat-footed
Manx Folk-lore and SiLperstitions. 8 1
especially? For my part I have not been trained to distinguish flat-footed people, so I do not recollect noticing any in the Isle of Man ; but, granting there may be a small proportion of such people in the Island, does it not seem to you strange that they should have their importance so magnified as this superstition would seem to do ? I must confess that I cannot understand it, unless we have here also some supposed racial characteristic, let us say greatly exaggerated. To explain myself I should put it that the non-Aryan aborigines were a small people of great agility and nimbleness, and that their Aryan conquerors moved more slowly and deliberately, whence the former, of springier movements, might come to nick- name the latter the flat-feet. It is even conceivable that there was some amount of foundation for it in fact. If I might speak from my own experience, I might mention a difficulty I have often had with shoes of English make, namely, that I have always found them, unless made to my measure, apt to have their instep too low for me. It has never occurred to me to buy ready-made shoes in France or Germany, but I know a lady as Welsh as myself who has often bought shoes in France, and her experience is, that it is much easier for her to get shoes there to fit her than in England, and for the very reason which I have already suggested, namely, that the instep in English shoes is lower than in French ones. These two instances do not warrant an induction that the Celts are higher in the instep than Teutons, and that they have inherited that characteristic from the non-Aryan element in their ancestry ; but they will do to suggest a question, and that is all I want : Are the descendants of the non-Aryan aborigines of these islands proportionately higher in the instep than those of more purely Aryan descent ?
There is one other question which I should like to ask before leaving the qualtagh, namely, as to the rela- tion of the custom of New Year's gifts to the belief
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82 Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions.
in the qualtagh. I have heard it related in the Isle of Man that women have been known to keep indoors on New Year's Day until the qualtagh comes, which some- times means their being prisoners for the greater part of the day, in order to avoid the risk of first meeting one who is not of the right sex and complexion. On the other hand, when the qualtagh is of the right description, con- siderable fuss is made of him ; to say the least, he has to accept food and drink, possibly more permanent gifts. Thus a tall, black-haired native of Kirk Michael described to me how he chanced on New Year's Day years ago to turn into a lonely cottage in order to light his pipe, and how he found he was the qualtagh : he had to sit down to have food, and when he went away it was with a present and the blessings of the family. Now New Year's Day is the time for gifts in Wales, as shown by the name for them, calennig, which is derived from calan, the Welsh form of the Latin calender, New Year's Day being in Welsh Y Calan, ' the Calends'. The same is the day for gifts in Scotland and in Ireland, except in so far as Christmas- boxes have been making inroads from England ; I need not add that the Jour de I'An is the day for gifts also in France. My question then is this : Is there any connec- tion of origin between the institution of New Year's Day gifts and the belief in a qualtagh ?
Now that it has been indicated what sort of a qualtagh it is unlucky to have, I may as well proceed to mention the other things which I have heard treated as unlucky in the Island. Some of them scarcely require to be noticed, as there is nothing specially Manx about them, such as the belief that it is unlucky to have the first glimpse of the new moon through glass. That is a superstition which is, I believe, widely spread, and, among other countries, it is quite familiar in Wales. It is also believed in Man, as it used to be in Wales and Ireland, that it is unlucky to dis- turb antiquities, especially old burial-places and old churches.
Manx Folk- core and Superstitions. 83
This superstition is unfortunately fast passing away in all three countries, but you still hear of it, especially in the Isle of Man, after some mischief has been done. Thus a good Manx scholar told me how a relative of his in the Ronnag, a small valley near South Barrule, had carted the earth from an old burial-ground on his farm and used it as manure for his fields, and how his beasts died afterwards. The narrator said he did not know whether there was any truth in it, but everybody believed that it was the reason why the cattle died ; and so did the farmer himself at last : so he desisted from completing his disturbance of the old site. It is possibly for a similar reason that a house in ruins is seldom pulled down and the materials used for other buildings : where that has been done mis- fortunes have ensued : at any rate, I have heard it said more than once. I ought to have stated that the non- disturbance of antiquities in the Island is quite consistent with their being now and then shamefully neglected as elsewhere: this is now met by an excellent statute recently enacted by the House of Keys for the preservation of the public monuments in the Island.
Of the other and more purely Manx superstitions I may mention one which obtains among the Peel fishermen of the present day : no boat is willing to be third in the order of sailing out from Peel harbour to the fisheries. So it sometimes happens that after two boats have departed, the others remain watching each other for days, each hoping that somebody else may be reckless enough to break through the invisible barrier of ' bad luck'. I have often asked for an explanation of this superstition, but the only intelligible answer I have had was that it has been observed that the third boat has done badly several years in succession ; but I am unable to ascertain how far that repre- sents a fact. Another of the unlucky things is to have a white stone in the boat, even in the ballast, and for that I never could get any explanation at all ; but there is no doubt as to the fact of this superstition, and I may illus-
G 2
84 Manx Folk-lore and Supei^stitions.
trate it from the case of a clergyman's son on the west side, who took it into his head to go out with some fishermen several days in succession. They chanced to be unsuccessful each time, and they gave their Jonah the nickname of Clagli Vane or ' White Stone'. Here I may mention a fact which I do not know where else to put, namely, that a fisherman on his way in the morning to the fishing, and chancing to pass by the cottage of another fisherman who is not on friendly terms with him, will pluck a straw from the thatch of the latter's dwelling. Thereby he is supposed to rob him of luck in the fishing for that day. One would expect to learn that the straw from the thatch served as the subject of an incantation directed against the owner of the thatch, but I have never heard anything suggested to that effect : so I conclude that the plucking of the straw is only a partial survival of what was once a complete ritual for bewitching one's neighbour.
Owing to my ignorance as to the superstitions of other fishermen than those of the Isle of Man, I will not attempt to classify the remaining instances to be mentioned, such as the unluckiness of mentioning a horse or a mouse on board a fishing-boat : I seem, however, to have heard of similar taboos among Scotch fishermen. Novices in the Manx fisheries have to learn not to point to anything with one finger : they have to point with the whole hand or not at all. Whether the Manx are alone in thinking it un- lucky to lend salt from one boat to another when they are engaged in the fishing, I know not : such lending would probably be inconvenient, but why it should be unlucky,. as they believe it to be, does not appear. The first of May is a day on which it is unlucky to lend anything, and especially to give anyone fire. This looks as if it pointed back to some Druidic custom of lighting all fires at that time from a sacred hearth, but, so far as is known, this- only took place at the beginning of the other half-year
Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions. 85
namely, Allhallows, called in Manx Laa 'II mooar ny Saintsh, ' the Day of the great Feast of the Saints'.
Lastly, I may mention that it is unlucky to say that you are very well : at any rate, I infer that it is regarded so, as you will never get a Manxman to say that he is feer vicy 'very well'. He usually admits that he is 'middling'; and if by any chance he risks a stronger adjective, he hastens to qualify it by adding ' now' or ' just now', with an emphasis indicative of his anxiety not to say too much. His habits of speech point back to a time when the Manx mind was dominated by the fear of awaking malignant influences in the spirit-world around him. This has had the effect of giving the Manx peasant's character a tinge of reserve and suspicion, which makes it difficult to gain his confidence : his acquaintance has, therefore, to be cultivated for some time before you can say that you know the workings of his heart. The pagan belief in a Nemesis has doubtless passed away, but not without materially affecting the Manx idea of a personal devil. Ever since the first allusion made in my presence by Manxmen to the devil, I have been more and more deeply impressed that the Manx devil is a much more formidable being than Englishmen or Welshmen picture him. He is a graver and, if I may say so, a more respectable being, allowing no liberties to be taken with his name, so you had better not call him a Devil, the Evil One, or like names, for his proper designation is Noid ny Hanmey, ' the Enemy of the Soul', and in ordinary Anglo-Manx conversation he is commonly called ' the Enemy of Souls'. The Manx are, as a rule, a sober people, and highly religious ; as regards their theological views, they are mostly members of the Church of England or Wesleyan Methodists, or else both, which is by no means unusual. Religious phrases are not rare in their ordinary conversation ; in fact, they struck me as being of more frequent occurrence than in Wales, even the Wales of my boyhood ; and here and
86 Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions.
there this fondness for religious phraseology has left its traces on the native vocabulary. Take, for example, the word for ' anybody, a person, or human being', which Cregeen ^nxxV^'s, py agJi or p'agk : he rightly regards it as the colloquial pronunciation of peccagh, ' a sinner'. So, when one knocks at a Manx door and calls out. Vet fagJi st/ne ? he strictly speaking asks, ' Is there any sinner indoors ?' The question has, however, been explained to me, with unconscious irony, as properly meaning ' Is there any Christian indoors?' and care is now taken in reading to pro- nounce the consonants of the word peccagJi, ' sinner', so as to distinguish it from the word for ' anybody' : but the identity of origin is unmistakable.
Lastly, the fact that a curse is a species of prayer, to wit, a prayer for evil to follow, is well exemplified in Manx by the same words givee^ and gweeagJiyii meaning both kinds of prayer. Thus I found myself stumbling several times, in reading through the Psalms in Manx, from not bearing in mind the sinister meaning of these words ; for example, in Ps. xiv, 6, where we have Ta 'n becal oc lane dy gJiweeaghyn as dy herriuid, which I mechanically construed to mean "Their mouth is full of praying and bitterness", instead of " cursing and bitterness"; and so in other cases, such as Ps. x, 7, and cix, 27.
It occurred to me on various occasions to make inquiries as to the attitude of religious Manxmen towards witch- craft and the charmer's vocation. Nobody, so far as I know, accuses them of favouring witchcraft in any way whatsoever ; but I have heard it distinctly stated that the most religious men are they who have most confidence in charmers and their charms ; and a lay preacher whom I know has been mentioned to me as now and then doing a little charming in cases of danger or pressing need. On the whole, I think the charge against religious people of
^ Old-fashioned grammarians and dictionary makers are always delighted to handle Mrs. Partington's broom : so Kelly thinks he has done a fine thing by printing ^//(jv, ' prayer', cLnd^wee, ' cursing'.
Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions. 2>j
consulting charmers is exaggerated ; but I believe that recourse to the charmer is more usual and more openly- had than, for example, in Wales, where those who consult a dyn Jiyspys or ' wise man' have to do it secretly, and at the risk of being expelled by their co-religionists from the Seiet or ' Society'. There is somewhat in the atmosphere of Man to remind one rather of the Wales of a past generation, the'Wales of the Rev. Edmund Jones, author of a Relation of Apparitions of Spirits ift the Coimty of Mon- mouth and the Principality of Wales (Newport, 1813), a book which its author tells us was " designed to confute and to prevent the infidelity of denying the being and apparition of spirits, which tends to irreligion and atheism". That little volume not only deserves to be known to the Psychical Society, but it might be consulted with a certain amount of advantage by folk-lorists.
The Manx peasantry are perhaps the most independent and prosperous in the British Isles ; but their position geographically and politically has been favourable to the continuance of ideas not quite up to the level of the latest papers on Darwinism and Evolution read at our Church Congresses in this country. This you may say is here wide of the mark ; but, after giving you in my first paper specimens of rather ancient superstitions as recently known in the Island, it is but right that you should have an idea of the surroundings in which they have lingered into modern times. Perhaps nothing will better serve to bring this home to your minds than the fact, for which there is abundant evidence, that old people still living remember men and women clad in white sheets doing penance pub- licly in the churches of Man. Some of the penitents have only been dead some six or seven years, nay, it is possible, for anything I know, that one or two may be still alive. This seems to us in this country to belong, so to say, to ancient history, and it transports us to a state of things which we find it hard to realise. The lapse of years has brought about profounder changes in our greater Isle of
88 Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions.
Britain than in the smaller Isle of Man ; and we, failing ourselves to escape the pervading influences of those profounder changes, become an instance of the compre- hensive truth of the words,
Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.
J. Rhys.
Discussion.
Dr. Karl Blind : Prof. Rhys is right in stating that the ash- tree may be referred to the great ash-tree of Scandinavian mythology ; that it symbolizes the Universe, as described in Eddaic days. The well, whose water is exceedingly pure, re- minds us of the fountains that lie at the root of the Scandinavian ash-tree, and in the Edda it is said that it is as pure and white as the shell of an egg.
If I have rightly understood Prof. Rhys, a sacred thorn-bush is also mentioned. That would remind us of the worship of the thorn-bush in Teutonic literature. The thorn-bush is very much used among the Teutons for crematory purposes. No one was allowed to clip or go near them. Brand, in his Popular Antiquities, mentions such a thorn-bush in Scotland.
The well-worship was a familiar worship of our Scandinavian ancestors. It is easily understood why it should prevail very much in the Isle of Man.
As to the red-haired man : this refers to the Scandinavian conquerors of the older people of Iberian descent in the Isle of Man. These aborigines had still a fear of the red-haired man who had conquered them. The Isle of Man is full of names corresponding to Scandinavian. The people afterwards became Celticised in speech, but very often examples occur with the Germanic type.
Prof. Rhys says that the superstition about red-haired men may be found further back than the Scandinavian conquest of the Island. I have no doubt whatever that in very ancient times there has been wave after wave of Teutonic migration and emigration along the shores of Scotland. There are no doubt traces in
Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions. 89
poems that refer to older conquests of Man. The first movement was ahvays towards Ireland and then went back to Scotland. In the Isle of Man a great deal is spoken of the " little people", and the little people (as I hear from my daughter and son-in-law, who have visited the Island) are still worshipped there. Many inhabitants go to bed on stormy days to allow the little people to have refuge comfortably. The little people mean doubtless the Iberian ab- origines.
As to the instep, I can speak from personal experience. Al- most every German finds that an English shoemaker makes his boots not high enough in the instep. The northern Germans (I am from the south) have perhaps slightly flatter feet than the southern Germans.
With regard to the prohibition to carry manure from church- yards, a sanitary idea lingers under it, though doubtless connected with religious ideas as in other cases. In cat-lore, e.g.^ there is a great deal of scientific knowledge with regard to change of temperature, people having closely observed the manners of cats under different atmospheric conditions, and being able to tell, therefore, whether storm is brewing or fine weather coming on. In certain cases of diseases, such as small-pox for instance, the carrying of manure would certainly become fatal to beast or man.
Horse, mouse, etc., on board ship are held to be fatal, and they must be mentioned under other names. Shetland fishermen will not mention a church or a clergyman (the latter being especially unlucky) on board ship. They use quite other names on board.
A Manx man will not speak of himself as being very well. That superstition is all over the world. The Germans have the expres- sion beschreien. You must not mention a thing too favourably ; you are punished for too great exuberance of joy.
It is a mistake to think the Scandinavians did not bring any of their women with them. They are often mentioned in the sagas.
Mr. GoMME : With reference to well-superstitions, a very in- teresting suggestion made by Prof. Rhys is that rags are not offer- ings, but are put there for the cure of diseases. There is some evidence against that, from the fact that in the case of some wells, especially in Scotland at one time, the whole garment was put down as an offering. Gradually these offerings of clothes became
90 Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions.
less and less till they came down to rags. Also in other parts, the geographical distribution of rag-offerings coincides with the ex- istence of monoliths and dolmens. Though the Manx evidence goes against the more general conclusion, it is important to emphasise it. The absence of the tree in connection with well- worship is a very interesting subject. Where we find in England no tree, the rag-well gives way to the pin-well, and as the trees are worn away the pin, as another part of dress, is substituted.
As to the first-foot on New Year's Day, Prof. Rhys seemed to distinguish between the three different objects which were unlucky — a woman, red-haired, and splay-footed people. Red hair and splay-foot might be matters of race. Why not go a little bit further, and say the case of the woman is also a matter of race ? Mr. Stuart-Glennie's matriarchy theory is based on the fact of many tribes marrying women of different races. Two elements of the first-foot superstition may be put down as racial, why not the third ?
As to lighting of fire from one central fire, there is the belief that if no fire were found some great misfortune would happen. Fire-worship, Canon Taylor asserts, is not Aryan at all, but Iberian. As to fires being lighted from a common centre, I should like to see the Society take up the subject as one to in- vestigate. It is found in all parts where Celtic holding has been most lasting. Fires of the household are lighted from that heltan fire on a particular day. There is a superstition against not light- ing from that particular fire. It is evident that Prof. Rhys has observed with very great attention. I should like to put this question before him.
Mr. NuTT : As to the qualtagh, I have been thrown into an ocean of perplexity, first by Prof. Rhys and secondly by Mr. Gomme. It would seem from Prof. Rhys that the unlucky per- son is a remnant of the conquering race ; a woman is the unlucky person according to Mr. Gomme ; but if red-haired and splay- footed people, the qualtaghs were not likely to be women of the aboriginal race, i.e., assuming this race to have been a dark, small, high-instepped one. Assuming there is anything at all in the historical and ethnological explanation, why should unlucki- ness attach itself both to the conquering race and to the woman,
Manx Folk-lore and Superstitions. 9 1
who must be representative /ar excellence of the conquered race ? A grave doubt is suggested whether the historical explanation is really the correct one. If it is, I then would emphasise this point. The whole of the lower beliefs and practices of this mixed race is shown to come from the prehistoric lower races. It is a conclusion with much to recommend it on a priori grounds, but we must look very cautiously at it ; and when we find such objections as I have urged we must try and see if there are not other explanations.
Editorial. — We have received some information respecting the marks of the " qualtagh", or " first-foot", in other parts of Britain. We propose to print this in the next number, and we ask readers to send on, before the ist of May, any information on the subject, derived either from personal knowledge or from books, they may have. Both the positive and negative signs of the qualtagh should be noted. When the information is from personal know- ledge, exact localities and dates should be specified ; when from books, not only should the bibliographical indications be full and accurate, but all the points mentioned by the writer should be given so as to obviate the need for further reference. Letters should be addressed to Mr. J. Jacobs, 4, Hazelmere Road, Kilburn, London, N.W., and should be marked " First-foot" in the left-hand corner.
FOLK-LORE TALES OF CENTRAL AFRICA.
[collected in nyassaland.]
Story of the Man who lived by Overreaching
Others.
ONCE upon a time there was a great famine, and a certain man went to the forest, and found some figs, which he plucked and put into his bag. Having secured the figs he went on his way, and in his journey he came upon a man who was eating grass.
He said to him, "Why do you eat grass?"
The other replied, saying, " Because there is no food ; thou thyself seest that this is a time of hunger."
Then the deceiver said, " Here are some figs ; eat," and the other replied thanking him.
As the man who was eating the grass finished eating the figs, the deceiver turned and said, " Give me my figs."
To this the man replied, " Why did you give me your figs ? Did I ask them of you ?"
Then the two men disputed, the one saying that no man who is hungry would refuse to eat when food is offered to him, and the other only saying, " Give me my figs." After they had disputed a long time the man who had eaten the figs gave the other his fishing-net. So the dispute ended, and the man went on his way carrying the fishing-net.
It came to pass that while continuing his journey he came upon certain people who were trying to catch fish with their hands. Coming up to them he said, " Why are ye trying to catch fish with your hands ?"
Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa. 93
They replied, " We have no net, and the fish are defeat- ing us."
The deceiver said, "Just try this net of mine."
They tried the net and caught a great many fishes.
Then the deceiver turned round and said, " Give me my net which I took from the man who was eating grass ; the same who ate my figs. Give me my net ; give me my net."
They gave him many fish, and he went on his way.
At length he came to a village, and saw some people who had nothing to serve as relish with their porridge, for they were dipping their porridge on the ulcers on their bodies.
The man said, " Why are ye doing thus ?"
They replied, " Because we have no relish."
He said, " Here are some fish for you."
They thanked him, and took them, not knowing that he would turn again and ask for them. So, when they had eaten the fish he said, " Give me my fish ; the fish which I took from the people who used my net ; the net which I took from the man who ate my figs, even he who was eating grass. Give me my fish ; give me my fish."
They brought some millet and gave to him, and he went on his way.
While he continued his journey he came upon some guinea-fowls eating white ants, and he said to them, " Why are you eating white ants ?"
The guinea-fowls replied, saying, " They are our food."
The deceiver said, " Here is proper food."
The guinea-fowls said, " Give us that we may eat."
He poured it out, and they consumed it all.
When he saw that they had eaten the millet, he said, " Give me my millet ; the millet which I took from the people who were dipping their porridge on their ulcers ; the people who ate my fish ; the fish which I took from the people who appropriated my net ; the net which I took from the man who ate my figs, even he who was eating grass. Give me my millet ; give me my millet."
94 Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa.
The guinea-fowls took their wing- feathers and gave to him, and he went on his way.
As he journeyed further he came upon people who were decorated with the leaves of the maize-plant.
They said to him, " Give us feathers, so that we may decorate ourselves."
He gave them feathers, and they decorated themselves.
When he saw that they had finished decorating them- selves, he said, " Give me my feathers ; the feathers which I took from the guinea-fowls which ate my millet ; the millet that I took from the people who dipped their por- ridge on their ulcers ; the people who ate my fish ; the fish which I took from the men who used my net ; the net that 1 took from the man who ate my figs, even he who was eating grass."
They gave him a goat, which he secured, and went on his way.
He then came upon a village, and he said, " I wish to sleep here." The people agreed, and pointed him to a hut. He inquired, saying, " Where shall my goat sleep ?"
The people said, " There is the goat-fold, with the other goats."
The man seemed perplexed, and then said, "It would be well that my goat should remain in the cattle-fold."
They agreed, and he secured his goat in the cattle-fold.
The deceiver went to the cattle-fold during night and took his goat, and thrust a stick into it, and the goat died.
And as morning dawned, all the people arose, and saw that the goat was dead.
The deceiver said, " Give me my goat ; it has been killed by your cattle."
The people took a bullock and gave him, and he went away with it.
After he had journeyed to a distant part he cut off the beast's tail, and hid the carcase in the wood. He then planted the tail in the ground, and, holding on to the end,
Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa. 95
he cried with a great cry, " Come ye to my help. My bullock has entered the ground."
All the people gathered together, and they pulled upon the tail, and it broke.
The deceiver then said, " Ye have pulled off my bullock's tail. Make ye haste and bring your hoes, and dig down and recover my bullock."
They did so, and digged down, but came not upon the beast.
The deceiver then said, " Just so ! Give me my bullock, because ye have pulled off its tail,"
They gave him forty cattle.
The story is ended.
The Story of a Tshewa Hunter.
A certain Tshewa had a musical bow. It came to pass on a certain day that he went to hunt the reed-buck. He came upon reed-buck and struck at one with his arrow. He went home with it.
He then roasted it and ate it, and was filled.
Another day he went to hunt on the mountain, and while hunting he came upon a lioness with a young cub in a cavern on the mountain. He went and called the people, saying, " Let us go, ye people, that ye may seize it."
They went and got their shields and spears, but some went and took guns. Then they went all of them to the mountain to take the cub.
They arrived at the mountain, and said, " Show us where thou sawest the lioness and cub."
He replied, " Climb ye also the mountain, and ye will see the great cave where they are."
They climbed the mountain and saw a very large cavern, whereupon they all made a great noise, firing guns and beating shields, at which the lioness was affrighted and fled away.
They then took the cub and carried it home with them,
96 Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa.
at the same time jeering at their friend, and saying, " Thou, master, who sawest the Honess with a young cub on the mountain, wast afraid to seize it, and came and called us. We went to the hill and seized the cub of the lioness. Bring out meat that we may eat plentifully over this lioness' cub."
So he gave them forty hoes, and they were satisfied ; but they knew that he wished to get the lioness' cub so that he might have abundance of meat to eat.
The young lion ate heartily, and soon grew to a great size.
It came to pass on a certain day that he went with his lion to hunt buffalo. He went to the swamps, and came upon a large herd of buffalo.
He said to the lion, " My lion, how is it that thou dost not seize the buffalo? If thou dost not seize them I will kill thee."
So the lion roared, and the buffalo were affrighted, and he seized three. The others fled for fear and escaped.
He then called the lion and said, " Stay here, and I will go and call the people." So he went to call the people.
And it came to pass, while he was going to call the people, some people came up behind him and said, " See, here is a lion that has killed three buffalo." The lion roared.
Then they said, " Let us carry away the meat." The lion roared greatly when he saw that they were to carry off the buffalo meat, and he seized and killed a great many of them.
Then the man came up, and the people whom he had called, and when they saw the people lying dead around, they said, " This Hon of yours will not cease till he has killed all the people."
The owner of the lion replied, " Yes, indeed, but I will slay the Hon lest he kill the people and bring law-suits upon me."
So he went and flayed the buffalo, and took the liver of
Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa. 97
one and cut it in two, and threw the two pieces, one by one, to the h'on, which took them at once and ate them.
And it came to pass, when they were returning home, the master of the Hon said to the people, " Pass ye on leading the way, and the lion will follow behind. As for me I will follow after the lion and will slay it, because it killed the people. I was saying to myself that it would hunt buffalo for me."
So they went, and the lion, not being on the alert as they journeyed, was pierced with an arrow by its owner. It turned round, and when it saw who had pierced it, it made bounds and grappled with its master, but was killed eventu- ally by a blow from an axe. It fell down and died.
Its master skinned it, and carried the skin home with him.
The people said, " So it is with those who are made full. Even wild beasts may change again. Those who are made full may bite those who fill them." All said, " It is bad, very bad, to bring up wild beasts."
They ate their meat.
It is finished.
The Story of a Man who was a Deceiver.
A man went to a certain village and met with some girls, and inquired of them, saying, "Where are you going?"
The girls replied and said, " We are going to a marriage. Do you wish to accompany us ?"
The man agreed to go with them, and they all went on together.
So when they came to the village whither they were going, they all entered the cattle-fold and engaged in a dance, and at the close of the day they separated to their several sleeping-huts.
And it came to pass next morning that they all went to the reeds and remained there. The heads of the village prepared for the marriage^feast by killing several beasts.
VOL. III. H
98 Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa.
The girls were then called back, and again engaged in dancing until the meat had been divided.
When each party had received their share of the meat, it was carried away to the hut of the girls. Then the girls ordered the man who had come with them to go and cook their share. He did so, cooking it in two pots, outside the hut. Meantime all the young women and girls were in the hut.
Then the man feigned illness, and lay down. One of the girls went out, and seeing him lying down, inquired, "What is it ?"
He replied, saying, " My head is very painful."
But he did this merely feigning sickness ; he told lies.
The girl entered the hut where the others were, and the man got up and uncovered the pots in which the meat was being cooked, and ate it all, until only the bones remained uneaten. Then he lay down again.
Afterwards three of the girls went out and asked him saying, "Is the meat now prepared?" To this he replied, " I do not know ; I have not seen it,"
The girls then went and uncovered the pots which con- tained the meat, and behold ! there were only bones to be seen. They all wondered greatly, and cried out, " The meat is all eaten — there remain only the bones."
Thereupon they inquired of the man, " Where is the meat ?"
He replied, " I do not know. I was lying down, and I fell asleep."
The girls went and told the others who were in the hut, saying, " Come out, the meat is all eaten."
They came out, and bade good-bye to the men and women and the young men of the village. They said, ** Remain well. They have eaten all our meat."
The people wondered greatly, and replied, " Good-bye : go well. Salute your people at home."
So the girls went out of the village, and went on their way home, singing as they went. The man also went with them.
Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa. 99
They went on and crossed a river. The man there turned aside, saying, " I am going this way. Go ye well."
While they were departing from him he stood and called to them, saying, " Hear ye !"
The girls said, "Let us listen ; the man is calling after us."
The man said, " I ate your meat."
The girls replied, " Oh, dear ! we have been keeping company with a bad man — a very bad man ; he ate all our meat."
So they went home and saluted their people.
The end.
The Story of the Coney.
It came to pass on a certain day that the coney was •living in the bush, and was eating grass. He got up and went and stayed in a certain village.
On a certain day he said, " I am desirous of taking a girl to wife."
The people agreed, saying, " Take her ; but you must first go and show your skill in hunting game."
So the coney agreed, saying, " It is meet that I should first go and hunt game before I take the girl."
He went off to hunt game, and at length arrived in the forest. There he saw a garden of millet. He went into the garden and ate all the millet. He was filled, and went to the river and drank water. Then he went away home and saw a person.
He said to this person, " Go to your garden yonder ; I came upon dogs eating your millet." The coney arrived at the village.
The people said to him, " How are you so full ?"
The coney said, " I am full with honey."
But the people said, " Let us go and see our garden of millet." They also said, " You must go with us to see it also."
H 2
1 oo Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa.
The coney answered and said, " Nay, I am not desirous of going with you."
But the people said, " You must go and exercise your skill on behalf of your mother-in-law."
The coney replied, " I am very tired."
The people said, " Nonsense ! Let us go and watch with your mother-in-law." So he went with them.
They went on and came to the garden, and saw that the footprints were like those of the coney. They said, " Who was treading here? It was thou, coney."
The coney denied, saying, " It was not I."
The people said, " Why do you deny it, seeing that the footprints are the same as your own ?"
The coney answered, " I came upon dogs eating the millet, and I drove them out."
Then there started forth one of the girls and affirmed, saying, "It was thyself who ate our mother's millet. Why do you deny it ? At home we asked thee, saying, ' How art thou so full, coney ? ' But thou denied, saying, ' I am full with honey.' Thou merely deniest it, but thou didst eat our millet."
All the people said, " Bad son-in-law, it is so ; but go thou and drive out the wild cats that are living in our tree yonder, where we wish to eat fruit."
So the coney went away, saying, " As for me, when I arrive at the tree, how shall I drive out the wild cats, for they are very fierce ? " So he went on, weeping.
At length he arrived at the tree, and considered how he might catch the young wild cats.
He shouted to the young cats, " Hear, ye young cats ! Here is honey ; send out your father and mother that they may eat." Thus did the coney, thinking that it was a kind of poison which, if they ate it, would kill them.
So the old cats with their young ones came out of the tree. They said, " Here is the honey which the coney has given us." So they ate of the tree (poison), but they came not upon the fruit.
Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa. i o i
They said, " Give us the honey that we may eat it." It was given, and they ate it, and as they ate they found it contained bitter water.
They asked, " What kind of food is this ? It is like salt."
They ate, and all of them died.
When the coney came upon them he found they were all dead. He exclaimed, " Just so ! Now I have delivered myself, because my mother-in-law sent me to drive out the wild cats."
He then went to his mother-in-law and said, " I have killed the wild cats. Let us go and see them."
So they all went and came to the place, and found them even dead. The coney then said, " Give me now my wife, seeing that I am a man of power, having killed the wild cats."
They said, " Not so ; thou art a bad man, because thou didst eat all our millet."
So they drove him away.
The coney went away, nevertheless his heart was full of anger because they had refused him his wife. He was also full of sorrow, and he took a rope of bark and bound (hanged) himself so that he died.
The Story of the Man and the Reed-Buck.
It came to pass, a man was cultivating his garden. He sowed millet, which sprang up and grew well, and was ripe. Then came the time for reaping, and he went away to reap the millet.
It came to pass the next morning that he found his garden destroyed, for one-half of it was reaped.
Then said the owner of the garden, "Who has reaped one-half of my garden ? I will go and inquire at my village."
He came home and inquired, but all there denied having done so.
I02 Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa.
Then he began to "smell out" a certain person, and said, " It was thou who reaped my garden."
But this man drank uniuteyu and vomited, so his accuser paid him in cattle to the number of five.
So the morning after he went to his garden and found it reaped still more. He "smelt out" another person, and he also drank tunuteyu, and vomited likewise. He also was paid five cattle.
Again he went out to his garden and found it still more reaped. So he " smelt out" all the people, but [they having drunk iivmteyu and vomited] he took all the goods he possessed and paid them. There remained only his child- ren and his wives, these only — his cattle and his goats, and all his goods, he had parted with in paying the people.
So he said, " I will not do this. I will lie in my garden and catch the thief"
It came to pass, indeed, that, as he watched, the reed- buck came and danced in the middle of the garden, saying, " The people hereabouts reap with a knife, but, as for us, we reap with the mouth — we reap with the mouth, picking, picking."
So the man seized the reed-buck, and said, " So, then, thou hast done away with all my goods. Why so ? Thou art the thief who hast reaped my garden."
And the reed-buck answered, saying, " Pardon me, father, and I, even I, will repay you all your goods."
So the man listened, and said, " Well, let us go."
He took a bark-rope, and said, " I will bind thee."
The reed-buck said, " Do not bind me with a bark-rope, but bind me with a rope of grass instead. If you bind me with a bark-rope I will break it."
So the man was a fool, and listened to the reed-buck. He took grass and made a rope, and bound the reed-buck, and went on his way with it.
And it came to pass that they came to a deep ravine, and the reed-buck stood and considered, and then, by a bound, broke the grass rope, clearing the ravine, and land-
Folk-lore Tales of Central Africa. 103
ing on the other side. He laughed greatly at the owner of the garden, saying, " I have overreached you, by your taking grass to bind me."
The reed-buck passed on, laughing at the man.
The Story of the Traveller.
He went about among the villages of the people. He went to one village, and lighted upon the men in the cattle- fold. He entered the