The affix _la_ signifies 'abode.' Thus, 'Tuonela' is 'the abode of
Tuoni,' the god of the lower world; and as 'kaleva' means 'heroic,'
'magnificent,' 'Kalevala' is 'The Home of Heroes.' The poem is the
record of the adventures of the people of Kalevala--of their strife
with the men of Pohjola, the place of the world's end. We may fancy
two old Runoias, or singers, clasping hands on one of the first nights
of the Finnish winter, and beginning (what probably has never been
accomplished) the attempt to work through the 'Kalevala' before the
return of summer. They commence _ab ovo_, or, rather, before the egg.
First is chanted the birth of Waeinaemoeinen, the benefactor and teacher
of men. He is the son of Luonnotar, the daughter of Nature, who
answers to the first woman of the Iroquois cosmogony. Beneath the
breath and touch of wind and tide, she conceived a child; but nine
ages of man passed before his birth, while the mother floated on 'the
formless and the multiform waters.' Then Ukko, the supreme God, sent
an eagle, which laid her eggs in the maiden's bosom, and from these
eggs grew earth and sky, sun and moon, star and cloud. Then was
Waeinaemoeinen born on the waters, and reached a barren land, and gazed
on the new heavens and the new earth. There he sowed the grain that is
the bread of man, chanting the hymn used at seed-time, calling on the
mother earth to make the green herb spring, and on Ukko to send down
clouds and rain. So the corn sprang, and the golden cuckoo--which in
Finland plays the part of the popinjay in Scotch ballads, or of the
three golden birds in Greek folk-songs--came with his congratulations.
In regard to the epithet 'golden,' it may be observed that gold and
silver, in the Finnish epic, are lavished on the commonest objects of
daily life.
This is a universal note of primitive poetry, and is not a peculiar
Finnish idiom, as M. Leouzon le Duc supposes; nor, as Mr. Tozer seems
to think, in his account of Romaic ballads, a trace of Oriental
influence among the modern Greeks. It is common to all the ballads of
Europe, as M. Ampere has pointed out, and may be observed in the
'Chanson de Roland,' and in Homer.
While the corn ripened, Waeinaemoeinen rested from his labours, and took
the task of Orpheus. 'He sang,' says the 'Kalevala,' of the origin of
things, of the mysteries hidden from babes, that none may attain to in
this sad life, in the hours of these perishable days. The fame of the
Runoia's singing excited jealousy in the breast of one of the men
around him, of whose origin the 'Kalevala' gives no account. This man,
Joukahainen, provoked him to a trial of song, boasting, like
Empedocles, or like one of the old Celtic bards, that he had been all
things. 'When the earth was made I was there; when space was unrolled
I launched the sun on his way.' Then was Waeinaemoeinen wroth, and by the
force of his enchantment he rooted Joukahainen to the ground, and
suffered him not to go free without promising him the hand of his
sister Aino. The mother was delighted; but the girl wept that she must
now cover her long locks, her curls, her glory, and be the wife of
'the old imperturbable Waeinaemoeinen.' It is in vain that her mother
offers her dainty food and rich dresses; she flees from home, and
wanders till she meets three maidens bathing, and joins them, and is
drowned, singing a sad song: 'Ah, never may my sister come to bathe in
the sea-water, for the drops of the sea are the drops of my blood.'
This wild idea occurs in the Romaic ballad, ~he kore taxideutria~,
where a drop of blood on the lips of the drowned girl tinges all the
waters of the world. To return to the fate of Aino. A swift hare runs
(as in the Zulu legend of the Origin of Death) with the tale of sorrow
to the maiden's mother, and from the mother's tears flow rivers of
water, and therein are isles with golden hills where golden birds make
melody. As for the old, the imperturbable Runoia, he loses his claim
to the latter title, he is filled with sorrow, and searches through
all the elements for his lost bride. At length he catches a fish which
is unknown to him, who, like Atlas, 'knew the depths of all the seas.'
The strange fish slips from his hands, a 'tress of hair, of drowned
maiden's hair,' floats for a moment on the foam, and too late he
recognises that 'there was never salmon yet that shone so fair, above
the nets at sea.' His lost bride has been within his reach, and now is
doubly lost to him. Suddenly the waves are cloven asunder, and the
mother of Nature and of Waeinaemoeinen appears, to comfort her son, like
Thetis from the deep. She bids him go and seek, in the land of
Pohjola, a bride alien to his race. After many a wild adventure,
Waeinaemoeinen reaches Pohjola and is kindly entreated by Loutri, the
mother of the maiden of the land. But he grows homesick, and
complains, almost in Dante's words, of the bitter bread of exile.
Loutri will only grant him her daughter's hand on condition that he
gives her a _sampo_. A sampo is a mysterious engine that grinds meal,
salt, and money. In fact, it is the mill in the well-known fairy tale,
_Why the Sea is Salt_.[178]
Waeinaemoeinen cannot fashion this mill himself, he must seek aid at home
from Ilmarinen, the smith who forged 'the iron vault of hollow
heaven.' As the hero returns to Kalevala, he meets the Lady of the
Rainbow, seated on the arch of the sky, weaving the golden thread. She
promises to be his, if he will accomplish certain tasks, and in the
course of those he wounds himself with an axe. The wound can only be
healed by one who knows the mystic words that hold the secret of the
birth of iron. The legend of this evil birth, how iron grew from the
milk of a maiden, and was forged by the primeval smith, Ilmarinen, to
be the bane of warlike men, is communicated by Waeinaemoeinen to an old
magician. The wizard then solemnly curses the iron, _as a living
thing_, and invokes the aid of the supreme God Ukko, thus bringing
together in one prayer the extremes of early religion. Then the hero
is healed, and gives thanks to the Creator, 'in whose hands is the end
of a matter.'
Returning to Kalevala, Waeinaemoeinen sends Ilmarinen to Pohjola to make
the sampo, 'a mill for corn one day, for salt the next, for money the
next.' The fatal treasure is concealed by Loutri, and is obviously to
play the part of the fairy hoard in the 'Nibelungen Lied.'
With the eleventh canto a new hero, Ahti, or Lemminkainen, and a new
cycle of adventures, is abruptly introduced. Lemminkainen is a
profligate wanderer, with as many loves as Hercules. The fact that he
is regarded as a form of the sea-god makes it strange that his most
noted achievement, the seduction of the whole female population of his
island, should correspond with a like feat of Krishna's. 'Sixteen
thousand and one hundred,' says the Vishnu Purana, 'was the number of
the maidens; and into so many forms did the son of Madhu multiply
himself, so that every one of the damsels thought that he had wedded
her in her single person.' Krishna is the sun, perhaps, and the
maidens are the dew-drops; it is to be hoped that Lemminkainen's
connection with sea-water may save him from the solar hypothesis. His
first regular marriage is unhappy, and he is slain in trying to
capture a bride from the people of Pohjola. The black waters of the
river of forgetfulness sweep him away, and his comb, which he left
with his mother, bursts out bleeding--a frequent incident in Russian
and other fairy tales. In many household tales, the hero, before
setting out on a journey, erects a stick which will fall down when he
is in distress, or death. The natives of Australia use this form of
divination in actual practice, tying round the stick some of the hair
of the person whose fate is to be ascertained. Then, like Demeter
seeking Persephone, the mother questions all the beings of the world,
and their answers show a wonderful poetic sympathy with the silent
life of Nature. 'The moon said, I have sorrows enough of my own,
without thinking of thy child. My lot is hard, my days are evil. I am
born to wander companionless in the night, to shine in the season of
frost, to watch through the endless winter, to fade when summer comes
as king.' The sun is kinder, and reveals the place of the hero's body.
The mother collects the scattered limbs, the birds bring healing balm
from the heights of heaven, and after a hymn to the goddess of man's
blood, Lemminkainen is made sound and well, as the scattered
'fragments of no more a man' were united by the spell of Medea, like
those of Osiris by Isis, or of the fair countess by the demon
blacksmith in the Russian _Maerchen_, or of the Carib hero mentioned by
Mr. M'Lennan,[179] or of the ox in the South African household tale.
With the sixteenth canto we turn to Waeinaemoeinen, who, like all epic
heroes, visits the place of the dead, Tuonela. The maidens who play
the part of Charon are with difficulty induced to ferry over a man
bearing no mark of death by fire or sword or water. Once among the
dead, Waeinaemoeinen refuses--being wiser than Psyche or Persephone--to
taste of drink. This 'taboo' is found in Japanese, Melanesian, and Red
Indian accounts of the homes of the dead. Thus the hero is able to
return and behold the stars. Arrived in the upper world, he warns men
to 'beware of perverting innocence, of leading astray the pure of
heart; they that do these things shall be punished eternally in the
depths of Tuoni. There is a place prepared for evil-doers, a bed of
stones burning, rocks of fire, worms and serpents.' This speech throws
but little light on the question of how far a doctrine of rewards and
punishments enters into primitive ideas of a future state. The
'Kalevala,' as we possess it, is necessarily, though faintly, tinged
with Christianity; and the peculiar vices which are here threatened
with punishment are not those which would have been most likely to
occur to the early heathen singers of this _runot_.
Waeinaemoeinen and Ilmarinen now go together to Pohjola, but the fickle
maiden of the land prefers the young forger of the sampo to his elder
and imperturbable companion. Like a northern Medea, or like the
Master-maid in Dr. Dasent's _Tales from the Norse_, or like the hero
of the Algonquin tale and the Samoan ballad, she aids her alien lover
to accomplish the tasks assigned to him. He ploughs with a plough of
gold the adder-close, or field of serpents; he bridles the wolf and
the bear of the lower world, and catches the pike that swim in the
waters of forgetfulness. After this, the parents cannot refuse their
consent, the wedding-feast is prepared, and all the world, except the
_seduisant_ Lemminkainen, is bidden to the banquet. The narrative now
brings in the ballads that are sung at a Finnish marriage.
First, the son-in-law enters the house of the parents of the bride,
saying, 'Peace abide with you in this illustrious hall.' The mother
answers, 'Peace be with you even in this lowly hut.' Then Waeinaemoeinen
began to sing, and no man was so hardy as to clasp hands and contend
with him in song. Next follow the songs of farewell, the mother
telling the daughter of what she will have to endure in a strange
home: 'Thy life was soft and delicate in thy father's house. Milk and
butter were ready to thy hand; thou wert as a flower of the field, as
a strawberry of the wood; all care was left to the pines of the
forest, all wailing to the wind in the woods of barren lands. But now
thou goest to another home, to an alien mother, to doors that grate
strangely on their hinges.' 'My thoughts,' the maiden replies, 'are as
a dark night of autumn, as a cloudy day of winter; my heart is sadder
than the autumn night, more weary than the winter day.' The maid and
the bridegroom are then lyrically instructed in their duties: the girl
is to be long-suffering, the husband to try five years' gentle
treatment before he cuts a willow wand for his wife's correction. The
bridal party sets out for home, a new feast is spread, and the
bridegroom congratulated on the courage he must have shown in stealing
a girl from a hostile tribe.
While all is merry, the mischievous Lemminkainen sets out, an unbidden
guest, for Pohjola. On his way he encounters a serpent, which he slays
by the song of serpent-charming. In this 'mystic chain of verse' the
serpent is not addressed as the gentle reptile, god of southern
peoples, but is spoken of with all hatred and loathing: 'Black
creeping thing of the low lands, monster flecked with the colours of
death, thou that hast on thy skin the stain of the sterile soil, get
thee forth from the path of a hero.' After slaying the serpent,
Lemminkainen reaches Pohjola, kills one of his hosts, and fixes his
head on one of a thousand stakes for human skulls that stood about
the house, as they might round the hut of a Dyak in Borneo. He then
flees to the isle of Saari, whence he is driven for his heroic
profligacy, and by the hatred of the only girl whom he has _not_
wronged. This is a very pretty touch of human nature.
He now meditates a new incursion into Pohjola. The mother of Pohjola
(it is just worth noticing that the leadership assumed by this woman
points to a state of society when the family was scarcely formed)
calls to her aid 'her child the Frost'; but the frost is put to shame
by a hymn of the invader's, a song against the Cold: 'The serpent was
his foster-mother, the serpent with her barren breasts; the wind of
the north rocked his cradle, and the ice-wind sang him to sleep, in
the midst of the wild marsh-land, where the wells of the waters
begin.' It is a curious instance of the animism, the vivid power of
personifying all the beings and forces of nature, which marks the
'Kalevala,' that the Cold speaks to Lemminkainen in human voice, and
seeks a reconciliation.
At this part of the epic there is an obvious lacuna. The story goes to
Kullervo, a luckless man, who serves as shepherd to Ilmarinen.
Thinking himself ill-treated by the heroic smith's wife, the shepherd
changes his flock into bears and wolves, which devour their mistress.
Then he returns to his own home, where he learns that his sister has
been lost for many days, and is believed to be dead. Travelling in
search of her he meets a girl, loves her, and all unwittingly commits
an inexpiable offence. 'Then,' says the 'Kalevala,' 'came up the new
dawn, and the maiden spoke, saying, "What is thy race, bold young
man, and who is thy father?" Kullervo said, "I am the wretched son of
Kalerva; but tell me, what is thy race, and who is thy father?" Then
said the maiden, "I am the wretched daughter of Kalerva. Ah! would God
that I had died, then might I have grown with the green grass, and
blossomed with the flowers, and never known this sorrow." With this
she sprang into the midst of the foaming waves, and found peace in
Tuoni, and rest in the waters of forgetfulness.' Then there was no
word for Kullervo, but the bitter moan of the brother in the terrible
Scotch ballad of the _Bonny Hind_, and no rest but in death by his own
sword, where grass grows never on his sister's tomb.
The epic now draws to a close. Ilmarinen seeks a new wife in Pohja,
and endeavours with Waeinaemoeinen's help to recover the mystic sampo. On
the voyage, the Runoia makes a harp out of the bones of a monstrous
fish, so strange a harp that none may play it but himself. When he
played, all four-footed things came about him, and the white birds
dropped down 'like a storm of snow.' The maidens of the sun and the
moon paused in their weaving, and the golden thread fell from their
hands. The Ancient One of the sea-water listened, and the nymphs of
the wells forgot to comb their loose locks with the golden combs. All
men and maidens and little children wept, amid the silent joy of
nature; nay, the great harper wept, and _of his tears were pearls
made_.
In the war with Pohjola the heroes were victorious, but the sampo was
broken in the fight, and lost in the sea, and that, perhaps, is 'why
the sea is salt.' Fragments were collected, however, and Loutri,
furious at the success of the heroes of Kalevala, sent against them a
bear, destructive as the boar of Calydon. But Waeinaemoeinen despatched
the monster, and the body was brought home with the bear-dance, and
the hymn of the bear. 'Oh, Otso,' cry the singers, 'be not angry that
we come near thee. The bear, the honey-footed bear, was born in lands
between sun and moon, and he died not by men's hands, but of his own
will.' The Finnish savants are probably right, who find here a trace
of the beast-worship which in many lands has placed the bear among the
number of the stars. Propitiation of the bear is practised by Red
Indians, by the Ainos of Japan, and (in the case of the 'native bear')
by Australians. The Red Indians have a myth to prove that the bear is
immortal, does not die, but, after his apparent death, rises again in
another body. There is no trace, however, that the Finns claimed, like
the Danes, descent from the bear. The Lapps, a people of confused
belief, worshipped him along with Thor, Christ, the sun, and the
serpent.[180]
But another cult, an alien creed, is approaching Kalevala. There is no
part of the poem more strange than the closing canto, which tells in
the wildest language, and through the most exaggerated forms of savage
imagination, the tale of the introduction of Christianity. Marjatta
was a maiden, 'as pure as the dew is, as holy as stars are that live
without stain.' As she fed her flocks, and listened to the singing of
the golden cuckoo, a berry fell into her bosom. After many days she
bore a child, and the people despised and rejected her, and she was
thrust forth, and her babe was born in a stable, and cradled in the
manger. Who should baptise the babe? The god of the wilderness
refused, and Waeinaemoeinen would have had the young child slain. Then
the infant rebuked the ancient Demigod, who fled in anger to the sea,
and with his magic song he built a magic barque, and he sat therein,
and took the helm in his hand. The tide bore him out to sea, and he
lifted his voice and sang: 'Times go by, and suns shall rise and set,
and then shall men have need of me, and shall look for the promise of
my coming that I may make a new sampo, and a new harp, and bring back
sunlight and moonshine, and the joy that is banished from the world.'
Then he crossed the waters, and gained the limits of the sea, and the
lower spaces of the sky.
Here the strange poem ends at its strangest moment, with the cry,
which must have been uttered so often, but is heard here alone, of a
people reluctantly deserting the gods that it has fashioned in its own
likeness, for a faith that has not sprung from its needs or fears. Yet
it cherishes the hope that this tyranny shall pass over: 'they are
gods, and behold they shall die, and the waves be upon them at last.'
As the 'Kalevala,' and as all relics of folklore, all _Maerchen_ and
ballads prove, the lower mythology--the elemental beliefs of the
people--do survive beneath a thin covering of Christian conformity.
There are, in fact, in religion, as in society, two worlds, of which
the one does not know how the other lives. The class whose literature
we inherit, under whose institutions we live, at whose shrines we
worship, has changed as outworn raiment its manners, its gods, its
laws; has looked before and after, has hoped and forgotten, has
advanced from the wilder and grosser to the purest faith. Beneath the
progressive class, and beneath the waves of this troublesome world,
there exists an order whose primitive form of human life has been far
less changeful, a class which has put on a mere semblance of new
faiths, while half-consciously retaining the remains of immemorial
cults.
Obviously, as M. Fauriel has pointed out in the case of the modern
Greeks, the life of such folk contains no element of progress, admits
no break in continuity. Conquering armies pass and leave them still
reaping the harvest of field and river; religions appear, and they are
baptised by thousands, but the lower beliefs and dreads that the
progressive class has outgrown remain unchanged.
Thus, to take the instance of modern Greece, the high gods of the
divine race of Achilles and Agamemnon are forgotten, but the
descendants of the Penestae, the _villeins_ of Thessaly, still dread
the beings of the popular creed, the Nereids, the Cyclopes, and the
Lamia.[181]
The last lesson we would attempt to gather from the 'Kalevala' is
this: that a comparison of the _thoroughly popular_ beliefs of all
countries, the beliefs cherished by the non-literary classes whose
ballads and fairy tales have only recently been collected, would
probably reveal a general identity, concealed by diversity of name,
among the 'lesser people of the skies,' the elves, fairies, cyclopes,
giants, nereids, brownies, lamiae. It could then be shown that some of
these spirits survive among the lower beings of the mythology of what
the Germans call a _cultur-volk_ like the Greeks or Romans. It could
also be proved that much of the narrative element in the classic epics
is to be found in a popular or childish form in primitive fairy tales.
The question would then come to be, Have the higher mythologies been
developed, by artistic poets, out of the materials of a race which
remained comparatively untouched by culture; or are the lower spirits,
and the more simple and puerile forms of myth, degradations of the
inventions of a cultivated class? In the majority of cases, the former
theory is correct.
FOOTNOTES:
[172] Talvj, _Charakteristik der Volkslieder_, p. 3.
[173] Fauriel, _Chants de la Grece moderne_.
[174] Thus Scotland scarcely produced any ballads, properly speaking,
after the Reformation. The Kirk suppressed the dances to whose motion
the ballad was sung in Scotland, as in Greece, Provence, and France.
[175] L. Preller's _Ausgewaehlte Aufsaetze_. Greek ideas on the origin
of Man. It is curious that the myth of a gold, a silver, and a copper
race occurs in South America. See Brasseur de Bourbourg's _Notes on
the Popol Vuh_.
[176] See essay on _Early History of the Family_.
[177] This constant struggle may be, and of course by one school of
comparative mythologists will be, represented as the strife between
light and darkness, the sun's rays, and the clouds of night, and so
on. M. Castren has well pointed out that the struggle has really an
historical meaning. Even if the myth be an elementary one, its
constructors must have been in the exogamous stage of society.
[178] Sampo _may_ be derived from a Thibetan word, meaning 'fountain
of good,' or it may possibly be connected with the Swedish _stamp_, a
hand-mill. The talisman is made of all the quaint odds and ends that
the Fetichist treasures, swan's feathers, flocks of wool, and so on.
[179] _Fortnightly Review_, 1869: 'The Worship of Plants and Animals.'
[180] Mr. M'Lennan in the _Fortnightly Review_, February, 1870.
[181] M. Schmidt, _Volksleben der Neugriechen_, finds comparatively
few traces of the worship of Zeus, and these mainly in proverbial
expressions.
_THE DIVINING ROD._
There is something remarkable, and not flattering to human sagacity,
in the periodical resurrection of superstitions. Houses, for example,
go on being 'haunted' in country districts, and no educated man
notices the circumstance. Then comes a case like that of the Drummer
of Tedworth, or the Cock Lane Ghost, and society is deeply moved,
philosophers plunge into controversy, and he who grubs among the dusty
tracts of the past finds a world of fugitive literature on forgotten
bogies. Chairs move untouched by human hands, and tables walk about in
lonely castles of Savoy, and no one marks them, till a day comes when
the furniture of some American cottage is similarly afflicted, and
then a shoddy new religion is based on the phenomenon. The latest
revival among old beliefs is faith in the divining rod. 'Our liberal
shepherds give it a _shorter_ name,' and so do our conservative
peasants, calling the 'rod of Jacob' the 'twig.' To 'work the twig' is
rural English for the craft of Dousterswivel in the _Antiquary_, and
perhaps from this comes our slang expression to 'twig,' or divine, the
hidden meaning of another. Recent correspondence in the newspapers has
proved that, whatever may be the truth about the 'twig,' belief in
its powers is still very prevalent. Respectable people are not ashamed
to bear signed witness to its miraculous powers of detecting springs
of water and secret mines. It is habitually used by the miners in the
Mendips, as Mr. Woodward found ten years ago; and forked hazel
divining rods from the Mendips are a recognised part of ethnological
collections. There are two ways of investigating the facts or fancies
about the rod. One is to examine it in its actual operation--a task of
considerable labour, which will doubtless be undertaken by the Society
for Psychical Research; the other, and easier, way is to study the
appearances of the divining wand in history, and that is what we
propose to do in this article.