LEGENDS
There exists among the Baffin Islanders, as among all the other tribes,
one long consecutive legend in particular, which should rank, if not
with the great Scandinavian and Icelandic Sagas beloved of William
Morris and of Wagner, at least with some of the most picturesque of
Grimm’s immortal fairy tales, and certainly with any of the strange and
monstrous legends of Kalevala, the Finnish cycle of national song.
Students of national story-telling will probably find analogies and
relationships between the Eskimo story of “Sedna” and the
characteristic folk tales of the other arctic or sub-arctic peoples
east and west. “Sedna” is beguiled into marriage by a gallant hunter
who is really not a man at all, but a sea bird. This sort of tragedy,
or disillusionment, is common in Eskimo fable. In one Alaskan-Eskimo
tale, the heroine marries the human semblance of a bear.
The Sedna legend—a religious legend around which turns a large volume
of Eskimo superstition—has its repulsive as well as its poetic aspects.
But to one who has lived intimately with these people, it would seem
that so strange and awesome a story of the wild north as the tragedy
and death of Sedna should be set, in song, to the metre of Kalevala and
Hiawatha. It is the metre of a child-like version of adventures
happening to a child-like folk.
Belief in this legend, in the existence and the power of Sedna, a
maleficent sea-goddess of the underworld, forms a large part of the
Eskimo religion, and the annual autumnal festival arising out of it is
the principal celebration in their calendar. In connection with this
phantasy, it is noteworthy that the Eskimo conception of the spirit of
evil—or at least of hostility to man—is unlike that of any other
nation. The Eskimo devil is a woman.
The Eskimos are great story-tellers, and the bulk of their fables,
handed down by oral tradition from generation to generation, has
assumed a stereotyped form. Their narration demands the exercise of an
art in which the arctic folk excel—the art of vivid narration. Many of
these tales begin as recitatives; some are almost wholly related in
verse or musical form; others are told in prose, with every sort of
appropriate gesture, modulation of the voice, and facial expression. A
number of them are onomatopoeic in character, imitating the calls and
cries of the birds and creatures of the wild. Story-telling is one of
the principal features of the social life of these people of the north,
and bulks largely in the programme of all festivities.
Many of the Eskimo legends would require a certain amount of
bowdlerising before they could be presented to the world as a book of
Eskimo tales, a contribution to the folk lore of the nations; but some
of them (notably the well dramatised story of the migration of the
Saglingmiut, with its very essence of primitive arctic life) could be
retold intact. Ethnologists have made a fairly representative
collection of these stories in the course of the past fifty years, and
most of them are to be found in the bibliography of arctic travel.
Those incidental to these pages, with the exception, of course, of the
Sedna tradition, are fresh contributions to the subject, not included,
to the best of the writer’s belief, in any other work.
An amusing tale, related to the writer, is that of the amorous youth
who made a particularly disappointing mistake.
In a certain village there lived a lovely maiden with her father. She
possessed little but a happy disposition and a ready smile. The old man
himself was so poor that his one dream of the future turned on the hope
of his daughter securing a first-class hunter for a husband, who would
provide for the two of them ever after. No young man, attracted by the
girl’s bright eyes, was made welcome over the lamp in that igloo unless
her father satisfied himself as to his credentials. But, as luck will
have it apparently all the world over, the daughter’s love was won by
the most ineligible suitor of them all—a youth poor in everything but
in courage and hope and promise. The old man rejected all his overtures
and rudely denied him his daughter. So the two were driven to form
plans of their own.
They decided to run away together, and that she should merely feign
resistance when her lover arrived to carry her off. The night came for
the attempt. The old man and the girl retired to rest as usual, rolled
up in their blankets on the sleeping bench, and the lamp burnt low.
Now, the approach to their abode was across a neck of ice spanning a
deep ravine. The youth came along, and cautiously crept over the narrow
bridge. Quickly entering the igloo, and perceiving the two sleeping
forms, he snatched up one of them, furs and all, and rushed back whence
he had come. To evade all possibility of pursuit, he smashed down the
ice bridge behind him. Then, burning to look upon the face of his
bride, he drew the blankets from about her head—only to discover with
the utmost consternation that he had carried off the father instead of
the girl! Dropping his burden none too gently, he made off at top speed
and fled into the night. The story-teller failed to draw upon his
imagination as to what happened in the domestic circle thus
disastrously broken up, after that.
To return, however, to the chief of the legends—the legend of Sedna:
There was, once upon a time, a beautiful Eskimo girl, called Sedna. She
was her widowed father’s only daughter, and they abode together by the
sea shore. As she grew up she was wooed by many a youth of her own
tribe, and of others who came from afar. But to no single one of her
lovers did her heart incline in the least. She refused altogether to
marry. She had a proud spirit and delighted in disdain. At last,
however, a day came when a very handsome young hunter appeared upon the
scene, from a far-off strange country. Neither Sedna nor Anguta, her
father, had ever heard of him before. He had beautiful skins cunningly
wrought with a stripe in the coat, and a spear of ivory. His kyak drove
inshore over the shining sea; but instead of landing on the beach, he
poised it on the edge of the surf and called to the maiden in her tent
above the strand to come off to him. He wooed her with an enticing
song: “Come to me; come into the land of the birds, where there is
never hunger, where my tent is made of the most beautiful skins. You
shall rest on soft bearskins.... Your lamp shall always be filled with
oil, your pot with meat.”
Sedna, framed in the entrance of the leathern hangings, refused. She
would not come down. Wholly won at first sight, maidenlike she must
refuse! So he began to plead and woo. He drew for her a picture of the
home where he would take her, the rich furs that he would give, and the
necklaces of ivory. Even though she vowed she wanted no husband, let
her come down with her bag, her sealskin sack of treasures, and fly
with him! Sedna made the coy boast, “Am I not the only one who does not
want a husband?” but even as she said it, her hand fell from the tent
flap and she stepped down towards the sea. “Let my bag be brought....”
He placed her aboard his kyak and paddled off on his return journey. So
Sedna went away with her lover and her father saw her no more on the
cliff by the seashore that was her home.
Came swift awakening and a bride’s tears! Sedna’s lover was no man at
all, but a phantom man whose real self was a Bird! One of those
peerless creatures of the arctic sky who, with “wide wing ...
broad-spread to glide upon the free blue road” above the crashing
floes, wheels over the bitter waters of the North. Some have it a
Fulmar, and some a Loon. It was a Spirit bird, having power to
transform itself into the semblance of a human thing. Falling in love
with the maiden, it had taken the form of the hunter and decoyed her to
its own.
Sedna was inconsolable. She had the horror of a very human girl at her
strange mate, and could by no means make his land her home and his
people hers. The legend has it that the Loon provided for her as an
ordinary hunter would have done; but she was wild and homesick, and
passed her days bewailing, as lone and desolate an exiled maiden as
ever cried, “Woe, woe!”
(Sedna’s disillusionment is a note in the story wholly coarse to
European ideas. The Eskimos are a people without prudery. A perfectly
natural incident on the journey revealed that the lover was a bird.)
But the father wearied for his daughter—the Eskimo word has the loving
possessive “his own daughter”—and at length fitted out his boat and
sailed away to that distant coast whither she had been borne. The
husband Bird was from home when he came to this land, and it was a sad
and sorry tale that greeted his ears from the wind-lashed, spray-beaten
maiden that had been his smiling, contented child. Without more ado, he
lifted her into his boat, made one swift turn, and fell to retracing
his course. The craft—a tiny mark—was soon lost to sight in the welter
of the waves.
Then the Loon, returning, enquired and said, “But where is my wife?”
The cry echoed round the naked cliffs. And answering cries, wind-borne
on the darkening air, told him that his wife had fled. Her father had
come and snatched her back, in grief and anger, to his bosom.
At once, the Bird, assuming the Phantom form again, followed in his
kyak; but when the Father saw him coming he covered up his daughter
with the furs and things he had loaded in the boat. Swiftly the kyaker
bore down upon them, and rushing alongside demanded to see his wife.
“Let me see my wife!” he cried. “Let me only see her; pray let me see
her!”
The angry father refused, and held determinedly on his way.
“Then let me see her hands only. I only ask to see her hands!” the
Kokksaut cried, to be passionately rejected again.
Then, bowing his head over the opening of his kyak in grief and
desolation, the kyaker fell behind. He had failed! His manhood had
failed; Sedna had hated and left as true a lover as ever a man could
have been to her, and he would no more of it! With one wild sweep of
his wings, he was a bird again, the kyak a mote upon the waters
beneath, and a stroke or two of his great vans brought him above the
boat of the fugitives. He hung there awhile, uttering the strange cry
of the Loon; but at last dropped away into the darkness.
Then there arose a storm—a black arctic storm—out at sea.
And Sedna’s father was stricken with fear. Terror of the bird-man
gripped his heart. Terror of the offended powers of sky and sea nerved
him to a bitter sacrifice. The raging waves demanded Sedna, and he must
give her up, and repulse her struggling, and see her drown. He bent
forward, and with one fearful thrust, cast his daughter out of the
boat—so to propitiate the offended sea!
The wild, white face rose to the surface, and despairing hands caught
at the gunwale. But the Terror was not to be defrauded, and the father,
frenzied with grief and the desperate determination of his deed,
snatched up an axe—a heavy thing of ivory and wood—and brought it down
upon those pathetic, clinging fingers. The maiden fell back into the
sea (and the first joints of her maimed and bleeding hands turned into
seals). But, coming up again, with agony in her eyes she made another
struggle to catch at the boat. Three times the drowning creature came
back; but she was the doomed victim of the sea, and the father must
consummate the sacrifice. Three times he smote and chopped at her
mangled hands. (The second joints became the ojuk, the ground seals;
the third joints made the walrus; and whales sprang of the rest.)
Apropos of this reeking legend, it must be borne in mind that the
Eskimo believe implicitly in Spirits and in their power to demand
sacrifice. The father, believing the storm to be an expression of the
anger of the Sea god (on behalf apparently of the sea-bird) and a
demand for the daughter he had reclaimed, did not hesitate to give her
up and to steel himself against her drowning agony.
At last Sedna sank, to rise no more.
And the storm sank, too. The boat presently came to land. The father
entered his tent and lay down beneath it and slept a sleep of
exhaustion and overspent grief. In the tent was fastened Sedna’s dog.
But that night there was a high tide which washed up the beach,
demolished the tupik, and drowned the two living creatures within. So
that man and dog rejoined the maiden in the depths of the sea. There
they have dwelt ever since, in some “house” or cave of Eskimo
imagination. There they preside over one whole region—called
Adlivun—where souls are imprisoned for punishment for a while or all
time, after death.
The sea creatures who owe their origin to Sedna belong to her and she
controls them. She protects them, and causes the storms which bring
wreckage and famine to the kyakers and sealers. Hence she is in Eskimo
mythology inimical to mankind, the source of the worst evils they know,
a spirit who has to be propitiated or quelled by ceremony, as the case
may be.
She is considered to be of enormous stature, with two plaits of hair,
each thick as an arm, and she has only one eye. The other was pierced
and put out in her drowning struggle.
The writer has seen an example of this sort of sacrifice in actual
life, and it redeems the story of Sedna’s father from the senseless
selfishness of which it seems to be compounded by some narrators. Two
boats containing a party of hunters were returning from sealing, when a
squall struck them. Before sail could be taken in, one boat overturned
and the men were thrown into the water. They all climbed back except
one, who was numbed with cold and dazed with shock. He did not sink
immediately, being held up by his deerskins. He even drifted close by
the boat, and easily within reach. One man, indeed, did reach out and
touch him with an oar, but when he failed to grasp it the general
decision was to let him drown. He was “material for the Tongak”
spirits, claimed by the Spirit of the sea—as was Sedna in the legend.
He simply drowned in the sight of the others, and of the women on
shore, who covered their faces with their hoods and gave the death
wails, i.e., began to shriek and howl in the frenzied manner proper to
the circumstances.
It is possible that no better story than that of Sedna (with all its
elements of phantasy, human emotion, poetry and savagery) could be
found in illustration of a good deal Dr. Marrett has to tell us in his
“Psychology and Folk Lore,” by way of reducing primitive folk-lore and
primitive procedure (religious or medical, or both, arising out of it)
to a science of primitive psychology. His masterly analysis of the
outlook of the wholly untutored mind on the phenomena of cause and
effect demonstrates quite clearly the sincerity and the obviousness of
the “savage” rites and customs which seem to us so barbaric, irrelevant
and monstrous.
The Sedna myth gives rise to the taboo, and the practices of the Sedna
ceremony. The aboriginal theory of things (the origin of the sea
creatures, the cause of storms, etc.), leads to aboriginal methods of
dealing with them “On (close) acquaintance, such as perhaps is to be
obtained only on the field,” says Dr. Marrett, “the savage turns out to
be anything but a fool, more especially in anything that relates at all
directly to the daily struggle for existence ... common sense is no
monopoly of civilisation,” although the educated application of it to
the material and spiritual needs of life may easily be so. The interest
of the primitive theurgist is a practical one, and the elements in his
problem are only two, namely, a supernormal power to be moved and a
traditional rite that promises to move it. The special function of the
conjuror or the medicine man among aboriginal peoples is to grapple
with the abnormal, and “this ever tends to constitute for the savage a
distinct dispensation, a world of its own.” There is in such a story as
the Sedna legend some groundwork of common sense and verifiable
experience; and in the practices which arise out of it, this has to be
taken into account, together with some very real occult content
(whether of suggestion or hypnotism, the most modern of sciences alone
could say), and some conscious fraud no doubt on the part of the
conjurors.
Prior, however, to an account of this ceremony, it will be as well
perhaps to devote some space to the conjurors themselves. For, among
the Eskimo, as among other primitive peoples, the typical “medicine
man” is a specialist, trained for his vocation and initiated into an
exclusive guild. He is by no means necessarily a fraud and a charlatan.
Normally, the primitive faith healer has as much faith in himself and
his methods as his patients have, and between the two of them—when it
is a question of a mental reaction to be obtained—there is no reason
why absolute success should not crown his efforts. In the sphere of
material results these amazing methods seem to be wholly empirical, and
yet it cannot be denied that the Eskimo conjurors sometimes produce
effects comparable only to some of the well-known demonstrations of the
“magic” of the East.