Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/132

106 attached. Väinämöinen embodies the shamanic idea poetically treated, the potent traditional wisdom of the wise man, and is always old. His complement is the wizard smith that forges the arrows, darts, knives, and blades which a wizard employed in the exercise of his vocation. Some objection, however, may be taken to this view. Two of the main functions of a wizard were to heal the sick and to divine the future. Now if Väinämöinen's personality had been founded on the ordinary notion of a wizard, how does it happen that in the narrative poems he is never summoned or invited to exercise either of these important offices? When he cuts his knee severely, he forgets some of the words of the magic song for staunching blood in a way hardly compatible with the idea that he is the most powerful of his class. He drifts helplessly about on the sea for years, apparently quite unable to extricate himself by magic means. When asked to make a sampo, he has to decline the task as beyond his power. Mere wizards, too, whatever their power, never figure as creators of the earth and of the trees upon it, though this creative act is constantly attributed to Väinämöinen. He was a personification no doubt, but hardly, we think, of an ideal shaman. Doubtless it often happened that a Finn about to proceed on a journey had recourse to a wizard to provide him with knots full of suitable winds or means for escaping the dangers of a land journey. But if instead of that he sought the help of Ilmarinen, who is stated by Agricola to have been a god that ruled over weather, he evidently drew a distinction between a wizard, real or ideal, and a god.

About the sampo myth, the exact meaning of which has puzzled all commentators, our author has something to say. In his opinion the sampo is nothing real; it is an ideal of prosperity longed for, but nothing more. In fact, the word is derived from a Swedish sambú, "living together," and represents ideally the clubbed resources of a household or family. Facts, however, can hardly be said to support this new theory. The songs in which the sampo is mentioned are sung when seed is sown in spring and autumn. Where the sampo is found, "there you find ploughing and sowing and every kind of vegetation." And in one song Sampo and Pellervo are found in parallel lines, showing the two ideas had much in common, if not identical. Comparetti very rightly regards the latter as a personification of the germinating force of the earth. Dr. J. Krohn believed the word sampo,