'I have found out a new cure for rheumatism,' said the lady beside whom
it was my privilege to sit at dinner. 'You carry a potato about in your
pocket!'
Some one has written an amusing account of the behaviour of a man who is
finishing a book. He takes his ideas everywhere with him and broods over
them, even at dinner, in the pauses of conversation. But here was a lady
who kindly contributed to my studies and offered me folklore and
survivals in cultivated Kensington.
My mind had strayed from the potato cure to the New Zealand habit of
carrying a baked yam at night to frighten away ghosts, and to the old
English belief that a bit of bread kept in the pocket was sovereign
against evil spirits. Why should ghosts dread the food of mortals when
it is the custom of most races of mortals to feed ancestral ghosts? The
human mind works pretty rapidly, and all this had passed through my brain
while I replied, in tones of curiosity: 'A potato!'
'Yes; but it is not every potato that will do. I heard of the cure in
the country, and when we came up to town, and my husband was complaining
of rheumatism, I told one of the servants to get me a potato for Mr.
Johnson's rheumatism. "Yes, ma'am," said the man; "but it must be a
_stolen_ potato." I had forgotten that. Well, one can't ask one's
servants to steal potatoes. It is easy in the country, where you can
pick one out of anybody's field.' 'And what did you do?' I asked. 'Oh,
I drove to Covent Garden and ordered a lot of fruit and flowers. While
the man was not looking, I stole a potato--a very little one. I don't
think there was any harm in it.' 'And did Mr. Johnson try the potato
cure?' 'Yes, he carried it in his pocket, and now he is quite well. I
told the doctor, and he says he knows of the cure, but he dares not
recommend it.'
How oddly superstitions survive! The central idea of this modern folly
about the potato is that you must pilfer the root. Let us work the idea
of the healing or magical herb backwards, from Kensington to European
folklore, and thence to classical times, to Homer, and to the Hottentots.
Turning first to Germany, we note the beliefs, not about the potato, but
about another vegetable, the mandrake. Of all roots, in German
superstition, the Alraun, or mandrake, is the most famous. The herb was
conceived of, in the savage fashion, as a living human person, a kind of
old witch-wife. {144}
Again, the root has a human shape. 'If a hereditary thief who has
preserved his chastity gets hung,' the broad-leafed, yellow-flowered
mandrake grows up, in his likeness, beneath the gallows from which he is
suspended. The mandrake, like the moly, the magical herb of the Odyssey,
is 'hard for men to dig.' He who desires to possess a mandrake must stop
his ears with wax, so that he may not hear the deathly yells which the
plant utters as it is being dragged out of the earth. Then before
sunrise, on a Friday, the amateur goes out with a dog, 'all black,' makes
three crosses round the mandrake, loosens the soil about the root, ties
the root to the dog's tail, and offers the beast a piece of bread. The
dog runs at the bread, drags out the mandrake root, and falls dead,
killed by the horrible yell of the plant. The root is now taken up,
washed with wine, wrapped in silk, laid in a casket, bathed every Friday,
'and clothed in a little new white smock every new moon.' The mandrake
acts, if thus considerately treated, as a kind of familiar spirit. 'Every
piece of coin put to her over night is found doubled in the morning.'
Gipsy folklore, and the folklore of American children, keep this belief
in doubling deposits. The gipsies use the notion in what they call 'The
Great Trick.' Some foolish rustic makes up his money in a parcel which
he gives to the gipsy. The latter, after various ceremonies performed,
returns the parcel, which is to be buried. The money will be found
doubled by a certain date. Of course when the owner unburies the parcel
he finds nothing in it but brass buttons. In the same way, and with
pious confidence, the American boy buries a marble in a hollow log,
uttering the formula, 'What hasn't come here, _come_! what's here, _stay_
here!' and expects to find all the marbles he has ever lost. {145} Let
us follow the belief in magical roots into the old Pagan world.
The ancients knew mandragora and the superstitions connected with it very
well. Dioscorides mentions mandragorus, or antimelon, or dircaea, or
Circaea, and says the Egyptians call it apemoum, and Pythagoras
'anthropomorphon.' In digging the root, Pliny says, 'there are some
ceremonies observed, first they that goe about this worke, look
especially to this that the wind be not in their face, but blow upon
their backs. Then with the point of a sword they draw three circles
round about the plant, which don, they dig it up afterwards with their
face unto the west.' Pliny says nothing of the fetich qualities of the
plant, as credited in modern and mediaeval Germany, but mentions
'sufficient it is with some bodies to cast them into sleep with the smel
of mandrago.' This is like Shakespeare's 'poppy and mandragora, and all
the drowsy syrups of the world.' Plato and Demosthenes {146a} also speak
of mandragora as a soporific. It is more to the purpose of magic that
Columella mentions 'the _half-human_ mandragora.' Here we touch the
origin of the mandrake superstitions. The roots have a kind of fantastic
resemblance to the human shape; Pliny describes them as being 'of a
fleshy substance and tender.' Now it is one of the recognised principles
in magic, that things like each other, however superficially, affect each
other in a mystic way, and possess identical properties. Thus, in
Melanesia, according to Mr. Codrington, {146b} 'a stone in the shape of a
pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable find,' because it
made pigs prolific, and fertilised bread-fruit trees and yam-plots. In
Scotland, too, 'stones were called by the names of the limbs they
resembled, as "eye-stane," "head-stane." A patient washed the affected
part of his body, and rubbed it well with the stone corresponding.'
{147a} In precisely the same way, the mandrake root, being thought to
resemble the human body, was credited with human and superhuman powers.
Josephus mentions {147b} a plant 'not easily caught, which slips away
from them that wish to gather it, and never stands still' till certain
repulsive rites are performed. These rites cannot well be reported here,
but they are quite familiar to Red Indian and to Bushman magic. Another
way to dig the plant spoken of by Josephus is by aid of the dog, as in
the German superstition quoted from Grimm. AElian also recommends the
use of the dog to pluck the herb aglaophotis, which shines at night.
{147c} When the dog has dragged up the root, and died of terror, his
body is to be buried on the spot with religious honours and secret sacred
rites.
So much for mandragora, which, like the healing potato, has to be
acquired stealthily and with peril. Now let us examine the Homeric herb
moly. The plant is thus introduced by Homer: In the tenth book of the
'Odyssey,' Circe has turned Odysseus's men into swine. He sets forth to
rescue them, trusting only to his sword. The god Hermes meets him, and
offers him 'a charmed herb,' 'this herb of grace' ([Greek]) whereby he
may subdue the magic wiles of Circe.
The plant is described by Homer with some minuteness. 'It was black at
the root, but the flower was like to milk. "Moly," the gods call it, but
it is hard for mortal men to dig, howbeit with the gods all things are
possible.' The etymologies given of 'moly' are almost as numerous as the
etymologists. One derivation, from the old 'Turanian' tongue of Accadia,
will be examined later. The Scholiast offers the derivation '[Greek], to
make charms of no avail'; but this is exactly like Professor Blackie's
etymological discovery that Erinys is derived from [Greek]: 'he might as
well derive critic from criticise.' {148} The Scholiast adds that moly
caused death to the person who dragged it out of the ground. This
identification of moly with mandrake is probably based on Homer's remark
that moly is 'hard to dig.' The black root and white flower of moly are
quite unlike the yellow flower and white fleshy root ascribed by Pliny to
mandrake. Only confusion is caused by regarding the two magical herbs as
identical.
But why are any herbs or roots magical? While some scholars, like De
Gubernatis, seek an explanation in supposed myths about clouds and stars,
it is enough for our purpose to observe that herbs really have medicinal
properties, and that untutored people invariably confound medicine with
magic. A plant or root is thought to possess virtue, not only when
swallowed in powder or decoction, but when carried in the hand. St.
John's wort and rowan berries, like the Homeric moly, still 'make evil
charms of none avail;'
Rowan, ash, and red threed
Keep the devils from their speed,
says the Scotch rhyme. Any fanciful resemblance of leaf or flower or
root to a portion of the human body, any analogy based on colour, will
give a plant reputation for magical virtues. This habit of mind survives
from the savage condition. The Hottentots are great herbalists. Like
the Greeks, like the Germans, they expect supernatural aid from plants
and roots. Mr. Hahn, in his 'Tsui Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi
Khoi' (p. 82), gives the following examples:--
Dapper, in his description of Africa, p. 621, tells us:--'Some of them
wear round the neck roots, which they find far inland, in rivers, and
being on a journey they light them in a fire or chew them, if they
must sleep the night out in the field. They believe that these roots
keep off the wild animals. The roots they chew are spit out around
the spot where they encamp for the night; and in a similar way if they
set the roots alight, they blow the smoke and ashes about, believing
that the smell will keep the wild animals off.
I had often occasion to observe the practice of these superstitious
ceremonies, especially when we were in a part of the country where we
heard the roaring of the lions, or had the day previously met with the
footprints of the king of the beasts.
The Korannas also have these roots as safeguards with them. If a
Commando (a warlike expedition) goes out, every man will put such
roots in his pockets and in the pouch where he keeps his bullets,
believing that the arrows or bullets of the enemy have no effect, but
that his own bullets will surely kill the enemy. And also before they
lie down to sleep, they set these roots alight, and murmur, 'My
grandfather's root, bring sleep on the eyes of the lion and leopard
and the hyena. Make them blind, that they cannot find us, and cover
their noses, that they cannot smell us out.' Also, if they have
carried off large booty, or stolen cattle of the enemy, they light
these roots and say: 'We thank thee, our grandfather's root, that thou
hast given us cattle to eat. Let the enemy sleep, and lead him on the
wrong track, that he may not follow us until we have safely escaped.'
Another sort of shrub is called abib. Herdsmen, especially, carry
pieces of its wood as charms, and if cattle or sheep have gone astray,
they burn a piece of it in the fire, that the wild animals may not
destroy them. And they believe that the cattle remain safe until they
can be found the next morning.
Schweinfurth found the same belief in magic herbs and roots among the
Bongoes and Niam Niams in 'The Heart of Africa.' The Bongoes believe,
like the Homeric Greeks, that 'certain roots ward off the evil influences
of spirits.' Like the German amateurs of the mandrake, they assert that
'there is no other resource for obtaining communication with spirits,
except by means of certain roots' (i. 306).
Our position is that the English magical potato, the German mandrake, the
Greek moly, are all survivals from a condition of mind like that in which
the Hottentots still pray to roots.
Now that we have brought mandragora and moly into connection with the
ordinary magical superstitions of savage peoples, let us see what is made
of the subject by another method. Mr. R. Brown, the learned and
industrious author of 'The Great Dionysiak Myth,' has investigated the
traditions about the Homeric moly. He first {151} 'turns to Aryan
philology.' Many guesses at the etymology of 'moly' have been made.
Curtius suggests [Greek], akin to [Greek], 'soft.' This does not suit
Mr. Brown, who, to begin with, is persuaded that the herb is not a
magical herb, sans phrase, like those which the Hottentots use, but that
the basis of the myth 'is simply the effect of night upon the world of
day.' Now, as moly is a name in use among the gods, Mr. Brown thinks 'we
may fairly examine the hypothesis of a foreign origin of the term.'
Anyone who holds that certain Greek gods were borrowed from abroad, may
be allowed to believe that the gods used foreign words, and, as Mr. Brown
points out, there are foreign elements in various Homeric names of
imported articles, peoples, persons, and so forth. Where, then, is a
foreign word like moly, which might have reached Homer? By a long
process of research, Mr. Brown finds his word in ancient 'Akkadian.' From
Professor Sayce he borrows a reference to Apuleius Barbarus, about whose
life nothing is known, and whose date is vague. Apuleius Barbarus may
have lived about four centuries after our era, and _he_ says that 'wild
rue was called moly by the Cappadocians.' Rue, like rosemary, and indeed
like most herbs, has its magical repute, and if we supposed that Homer's
moly was rue, there would be some interest in the knowledge. Rue was
called 'herb of grace' in English, holy water was sprinkled with it, and
the name is a translation of Homer's [Greek]. Perhaps rue was used in
sprinkling, because in pre-Christian times rue had, by itself, power
against sprites and powers of evil. Our ancestors may have thought it as
well to combine the old charm of rue and the new Christian potency of
holy water. Thus there would be a distinct analogy between Homeric moly
and English 'herb of grace.'
'Euphrasy and rue' were employed to purge and purify mortal eyes. Pliny
is very learned about the magical virtues of rue. Just as the stolen
potato is sovran for rheumatism, so 'rue stolen thriveth the best.' The
Samoans think that their most valued vegetables were stolen from heaven
by a Samoan visitor. {152a} It is remarkable that rue, according to
Pliny, is killed by the touch of a woman in the same way as, according to
Josephus, the mandrake is tamed. {152b} These passages prove that the
classical peoples had the same extraordinary superstitions about women as
the Bushmen and Red Indians. Indeed Pliny {152c} describes a magical
manner of defending the crops from blight, by aid of women, which is
actually practised in America by the Red Men. {152d}
Here, then, are proofs enough that rue was magical outside of Cappadocia.
But this is not an argument on Mr. Brown's lines. The Cappadocians
called rue 'moly'; what language, he asks, was spoken by the
Cappadocians? Prof. Sayce (who knows so many tongues) says that 'we know
next to nothing of the language of the Cappadocians, or of the Moschi who
lived in the same locality.' But where Prof. Sayce is, the Hittites, if
we may say so respectfully, are not very far off. In this case he thinks
the Moschi (though he admits we know next to nothing about it) 'seem to
have spoken a language allied to that of the Cappadocians and Hittites.'
That is to say, it is not impossible that the language of the Moschi,
about which next to nothing is known, may have been allied to that of the
Cappadocians, about which we know next to nothing. All that we do know
in this case is, that four hundred years after Christ the dwellers in
Cappadocia employed a word 'moly,' which had been Greek for at least
twelve hundred years. But Mr. Brown goes on to quote that one of the
languages of which we know next to nothing, Hittite, was 'probably allied
to Proto-Armenian, and perhaps Lykian, and was above all not Semitic.' In
any case 'the cuneiform mode of writing was used in Cappadocia at an
early period.' As even Professor Sayce declines to give more than a
tentative reading of a Cappadocian cuneiform inscription, it seems highly
rash to seek in this direction for an interpretation of a Homeric word
'moly,' used in Cappadocia very many centuries after the tablets were
scratched. But, on the evidence of the Babylonian character of the
cuneiform writing on Cappadocian tablets, Mr. Brown establishes a
connection between the people of Accadia (who probably introduced the
cuneiform style) and the people of Cappadocia. The connection amounts to
this. Twelve hundred years after Homer, the inhabitants of Cappadocia
are said to have called rue 'moly.' At some unknown period, the
Accadians appear to have influenced the art of writing in Cappadocia.
Apparently Mr. Brown thinks it not too rash to infer that the Cappadocian
use of the word 'moly' is not derived from the Greeks, but from the
Accadians. Now in Accadian, according to Mr. Brown, mul means 'star.'
'Hence ulu or mulu = [Greek], the mysterious Homerik counter-charm to the
charms of Kirke' (p. 60). Mr. Brown's theory, therefore, is that moly
originally meant 'star.' Circe is the moon, Odysseus is the sun, and
'what _watches over_ the solar hero at night when exposed to the hostile
lunar power, but the stars?' especially the dog-star.
The truth is, that Homer's moly, whatever plant he meant by the name, is
only one of the magical herbs in which most peoples believe or have
believed. Like the Scottish rowan, or like St. John's wort, it is potent
against evil influences. People have their own simple reasons for
believing in these plants, and have not needed to bring down their
humble, early botany from the clouds and stars. We have to imagine, on
the other hand (if we follow Mr. Brown), that in some unknown past the
Cappadocians turned the Accadian word for a star into a local name of a
plant, that this word reached Homer, that the supposed old Accadian myth
of the star which watches over the solar hero retained its vitality in
Greek, and leaving the star clung to the herb, that Homer used an 'Akkado-
Kappadokian' myth, and that, many ages after, the Accadian star-name in
its perverted sense of 'rue' survived in Cappadocia. This structure of
argument is based on tablets which even Prof. Sayce cannot read, and on
possibilities about the alliances of tongues concerning which we 'know
next to nothing.' A method which leaves on one side the common, natural,
widely-diffused beliefs about the magic virtue of herbs (beliefs which we
have seen at work in Kensington and in Central Africa), to hunt for moly
among stars and undeciphered Kappadokian inscriptions, seems a dubious
method. We have examined it at full length because it is a specimen of
an erudite, but, as we think, a mistaken way in folklore. M. Halevy's
warnings against the shifting mythical theories based on sciences so new
as the lore of Assyria and 'Akkadia' are by no means superfluous.
'Akkadian' is rapidly become as ready a key to all locks as 'Aryan' was a
few years ago.
'KALEVALA'; OR, THE FINNISH NATIONAL EPIC.
It is difficult to account for the fact that the scientific curiosity
which is just now so busy in examining all the monuments of the primitive
condition of our race, should, in England at least, have almost totally
neglected to popularise the 'Kalevala,' or national poem of the Finns.
Besides its fresh and simple beauty of style, its worth as a storehouse
of every kind of primitive folklore, being as it is the production of an
Urvolk, a nation that has undergone no violent revolution in language or
institutions--the 'Kalevala' has the peculiar interest of occupying a
position between the two kinds of primitive poetry, the ballad and the
epic. So much difficulty has been introduced into the study of the first
developments of song, by confusing these distinct sorts of composition
under the name of popular poetry, that it may be well, in writing of a
poem which occupies a middle place between epic and ballad, to define
what we mean by each.
The author of our old English 'Art of Poesie' begins his work with a
statement which may serve as a text: 'Poesie,' says Puttenham, writing in
1589, 'is more ancient than the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines,
coming by instinct of nature, and used by the savage and uncivill, who
were before all science and civilitie. This is proved by certificate of
merchants and travellers, who by late navigations have surveyed the whole
world, and discovered large countries, and strange people, wild and
savage, affirming that the American, the Perusine, and the very
canniball, do sing, and also say, their highest and holiest matters in
certain riming versicles.' Puttenham is here referring to that instinct
of primitive men, which compels them in all moments of high-wrought
feeling, and on all solemn occasions, to give utterance to a kind of
chant. {157a} Such a chant is the song of Lamech, when he had 'slain a
man to his wounding.' So in the Norse sagas, Grettir and Gunnar _sing_
when they have anything particular to say; and so in the Marchen--the
primitive fairy tales of all nations--scraps of verse are introduced
where emphasis is wanted. This craving for passionate expression takes a
more formal shape in the lays which, among all primitive peoples, as
among the modern Greeks to-day, {157b} are sung at betrothals, funerals,
and departures for distant lands. These songs have been collected in
Scotland by Scott and Motherwell; their Danish counterparts have been
translated by Mr. Prior. In Greece, M. Fauriel and Dr. Ulrichs; in
Provence, Damase Arbaud; in Italy, M. Nigra; in Servia, Talvj; in France,
Gerard de Nerval--have done for their separate countries what Scott did
for the Border. Professor Child, of Harvard, is publishing a beautiful
critical collection of English Volkslieder, with all known variants from
every country.
A comparison of the collections proves that among all European lands the
primitive 'versicles' of the people are identical in tone, form, and
incident. It is this kind of early expression of a people's
life--careless, abrupt, brief, as was necessitated by the fact that they
were sung to the accompaniment of the dance--that we call ballads. These
are distinctly, and in every sense, popular poems, and nothing can cause
greater confusion than to apply the same title, 'popular,' to early epic
poetry. Ballads are short; a long ballad, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has
said, creeps and halts. A true epic, on the other hand, is long, and its
tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the
form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher laisse of
the French chansons de geste, is full of conscious and admirable art.
Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in
vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite
station, _whose descendants are still in the land_, whose home is a
recognisable place, Ithaca, or Argos. Now, though these two kinds of
early poetry--the ballad, the song of the people; the epic, the song of
the chiefs of the people, of the ruling race--are distinct in kind, it
does not follow that they have no connection, that the nobler may not
have been developed out of the materials of the lower form of expression.
And the value of the 'Kalevala' is partly this, that it combines the
continuity and unison of the epic with the simplicity and popularity of
the ballad, and so forms a kind of link in the history of the development
of poetry. This may become clearer as we proceed to explain the literary
history of the Finnish national poem.
Sixty years ago, it may be said, no one was aware that Finland possessed
a national poem at all. Her people--who claim affinity with the Magyars
of Hungary, but are possibly a back-wave of an earlier tide of
population--had remained untouched by foreign influences since their
conquest by Sweden, and their somewhat lax and wholesale conversion to
Christianity: events which took place gradually between the middle of the
twelfth and the end of the thirteenth centuries. Under the rule of
Sweden, the Finns were left to their quiet life and undisturbed
imaginings, among the forests and lakes of the region which they aptly
called Pohja, 'the end of things'; while their educated classes took no
very keen interest in the native poetry and mythology of their race. At
length the annexation of Finland by Russia, in 1809, awakened national
feeling, and stimulated research into the songs and customs which were
the heirlooms of the people.
It was the policy of Russia to encourage, rather than to check, this
return on a distant past; and from the north of Norway to the slopes of
the Altai, ardent explorers sought out the fragments of unwritten early
poetry. These runes, or Runots, were chiefly sung by old men called
Runoias, to beguile the weariness of the long dark winters. The custom
was for two champions to engage in a contest of memory, clasping each
other's hands, and reciting in turn till he whose memory first gave in
slackened his hold. The 'Kalevala' contains an instance of this
practice, where it is said that no one was so hardy as to clasp hands
with Wainamoinen, who is at once the Orpheus and the Prometheus of
Finnish mythology. These Runoias, or rhapsodists, complain, of course,
of the degeneracy of human memory; they notice how any foreign influence,
in religion or politics, is destructive to the native songs of a race.
{160} 'As for the lays of old time, a thousand have been scattered to
the wind, a thousand buried in the snow; . . . as for those which the
Munks (the Teutonic knights) swept away, and the prayer of the priest
overwhelmed, a thousand tongues were not able to recount them.' In spite
of the losses thus caused, and in spite of the suspicious character of
the Finns, which often made the task of collection a dangerous one,
enough materials remained to furnish Dr. Lonnrot, the most noted
explorer, with thirty-five Runots, or cantos. These were published in
1835, but later research produced the fifteen cantos which make up the
symmetrical fifty of the 'Kalevala.' In the task of arranging and
uniting these, Dr. Lonnrot played the part traditionally ascribed to the
commission of Pisistratus in relation to the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' Dr.
Lonnrot is said to have handled with singular fidelity the materials
which now come before us as one poem, not absolutely without a certain
unity and continuous thread of narrative. It is this unity (so faint
compared with that of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey') which gives the
'Kalevala' a claim to the title of epic.
It cannot be doubted that, at whatever period the Homeric poems took
shape in Greece, they were believed to record the feats of the supposed
ancestors of existing families. Thus, for example, Pisistratus, as a
descendant of the Nelidae, had an interest in securing certain parts, at
least, of the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' from oblivion. The same family
pride embellished and preserved the epic poetry of early France. There
were in France but three heroic houses, or gestes; and three
corresponding cycles of epopees. Now, in the 'Kalevala,' there is no
trace of the influence of family feeling; it was no one's peculiar care
and pride to watch over the records of the fame of this or that hero. The
poem begins with a cosmogony as wild as any Indian dream of creation; and
the human characters who move in the story are shadowy inhabitants of no
very definite lands, whom no family claim as their forefathers. The very
want of this idea of family and aristocratic pride gives the 'Kalevala' a
unique place among epics. It is emphatically an epic of the people, of
that class whose life contains no element of progress, no break in
continuity; which from age to age preserves, in solitude and close
communion with nature, the earliest beliefs of grey antiquity. The Greek
epic, on the other hand, has, as M. Preller {161} points out, 'nothing to
do with natural man, but with an ideal world of heroes, with sons of the
gods, with consecrated kings, heroes, elders, _a kind of specific race of
men_. The people exist only as subsidiary to the great houses, as a mere
background against which stand out the shining figures of heroes; as a
race of beings fresh and rough from the hands of nature, with whom, and
with whose concerns, the great houses and their bards have little
concern.' This feeling--so universal in Greece, and in the feudal
countries of mediaeval Europe, that there are two kinds of men, the
golden and the brazen race, as Plato would have called them--is absent,
with all its results, in the 'Kalevala.'
Among the Finns we find no trace of an aristocracy; there is scarcely a
mention of kings, or priests; the heroes of the poem are really popular
heroes, fishers, smiths, husbandmen, 'medicine-men,' or wizards;
exaggerated shadows of the people, pursuing on a heroic scale, not war,
but the common daily business of primitive and peaceful men. In
recording their adventures, the 'Kalevala,' like the shield of Achilles,
reflects all the life of a race, the feasts, the funerals, the rites of
seed-time and harvest of marriage and death, the hymn, and the magical
incantation. Were this all, the epic would only have the value of an
exhaustive collection of the popular ballads which, as we have seen, are
a poetical record of the intenser moments in the existence of
unsophisticated tribes. But the 'Kalevala' is distinguished from such a
collection, by presenting the ballads as they are produced by the events
of a continuous narrative, and thus it takes a distinct place between the
aristocratic epics of Greece, or of the Franks, and the scattered songs
which have been collected in Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, and
Italy.
Besides the interest of its unique position as a popular epic, the
'Kalevala' is very valuable, both for its literary beauties and for the
confused mass of folklore which it contains.
Here old cosmogonies, attempts of man to represent to himself the
beginning of things, are mingled with the same wild imaginings as are
found everywhere in the shape of fairy-tales. We are hurried from an
account of the mystic egg of creation, to a hymn like that of the
Ambarval Brothers, to a strangely familiar scrap of a nursery story, to
an incident which we remember as occurring in almost identical words in a
Scotch ballad. We are among a people which endows everything with human
characters and life, which is in familiar relations with birds, and
beasts, and even with rocks and plants. Ravens and wolves and fishes of
the sea, sun, moon, and stars, are kindly or churlish; drops of blood
find speech, man and maid change to snake or swan and resume their forms,
ships have magic powers, like the ships of the Phaeacians.
Then there is the oddest confusion of every stage of religious
development: we find a supreme God, delighting in righteousness; Ukko,
the lord of the vault of air, who stands apart from men, and sends his
son, Wainamoinen, to be their teacher in music and agriculture.
Across this faith comes a religion of petrified abstractions like those
of the Roman Pantheon. There are gods of colour, a goddess of weaving, a
goddess of man's blood, besides elemental spirits of woods and waters,
and the manes of the dead. Meanwhile, the working faith of the people is
the belief in magic--generally a sign of the lower culture. It is
supposed that the knowledge of certain magic words gives power over the
elemental bodies which obey them; it is held that the will of a distant
sorcerer can cross the lakes and plains like the breath of a fantastic
frost, with power to change an enemy to ice or stone. Traces remain of
the worship of animals: there is a hymn to the bear; a dance like the
bear-dance of the American Indians; and another hymn tells of the birth
and power of the serpent. Across all, and closing all, comes a hostile
account of the origin of Christianity--the end of joy and music.
How primitive was the condition of the authors of this medley of beliefs
is best proved by the survival of the custom called exogamy. {164a} This
custom, which is not peculiar to the Finns, but is probably a universal
note of early society, prohibits marriage between members of the same
tribe. Consequently, the main action, such as it is, of the 'Kalevala'
turns on the efforts made by the men of Kaleva to obtain brides from the
hostile tribe of Pohja. {164b}
Further proof of ancient origin is to be found in what is the great
literary beauty of the poem--its pure spontaneity and simplicity. It is
the production of an intensely imaginative race, to which song came as
the most natural expression of joy and sorrow, terror or triumph--a class
which lay near to nature's secret, and was not out of sympathy with the
wild kin of woods and waters.
'These songs,' says the prelude, 'were found by the wayside, and
gathered in the depths of the copses; blown from the branches of the
forest, and culled among the plumes of the pine-trees. These lays
came to me as I followed the flocks, in a land of meadows honey-sweet,
and of golden hills. . . . The cold has spoken to me, and the rain
has told me her runes; the winds of heaven, the waves of the sea, have
spoken and sung to me; the wild birds have taught me, the music of
many waters has been my master.'
The metre in which the epic is chanted resembles, to an English ear, that
of Mr. Longfellow's 'Hiawatha'--there is assonance rather than rhyme; and
a very musical effect is produced by the liquid character of the
language, and by the frequent alliterations.
This rough outline of the main characteristics of the 'Kalevala' we shall
now try to fill up with an abstract of its contents. The poem is longer
than the 'Iliad,' and much of interest must necessarily be omitted; but
it is only through such an abstract that any idea can be given of the
sort of unity which does prevail amid the most utter discrepancy.
In the first place, what is to be understood by the word 'Kalevala'? 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
Wainamoinen, 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 Wainamoinen 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 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 folksongs--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, Wainamoinen 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 Wainamoinen 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
Wainamoinen.' 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, [Greek], 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 Wainamoinen 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, Wainamoinen
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.' {169}
Wainamoinen 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 Wainamoinen 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, Wainamoinen 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, of course, and the maidens are the dew-drops; {170}
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
Marchen, or of the Carib hero mentioned by Mr. McLennan, {171} or of the
ox in the South African household tale.
With the sixteenth canto we return to Wainamoinen, 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,
Wainamoinen 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.
Wainamoinen 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 Wainamoinen
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 Wainamoinen'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 Wainamoinen 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. {176}
But another cult, an alien creed, is approaching Kalevala. There is no
part of the epic 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
baptize the babe? The god of the wilderness refused, and Wainamoinen
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 Marchen 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 baptized
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. {178}
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?