Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/368

 328 Reviews.

The mythological chapters are perhaps the most interesting to students of folklore. They do not, however, contain an exhaustive statement of Finnish myth, but are confined expressly to the mytho- logy of the Magic Songs. May we hope that these sketches are but the prelude to an extensive treatment of the subject in another work?

The account of the Finnish " haltia " recalls the Melanesian mana, especially in its application to the ecstasy of the wizard. ♦■"^ In remarking that although haltia is a loan-word (= ruler) the idea evidently goes back to the earhest times, the author might have referred to the Vogul aatir ("prince") the name given to the spirits dwelling in the Vogul images. This word was borrowed in the Third Period, and therefore much earlier than haltia (which is Scandinavian) to express the same idea.

In his account of Ukko, the anonymous sky-god, Mr. Aber- cromby says that "the Finns assigned him many honorific epithets, but no wife or children." This statement, although it is probably accurate, is perhaps put too roundly, and might perplex a reader who had just learnt from Professor Comparetti's work on the Kalevala that " there is a supreme god of the sky, Ukko (the old man), who has a wife, Akka (the old woman)." The fact is that Bishop Agricola, writing in the sixteenth century, included in his list of Finnish deities a wife of Ukko, whom he called Rauni, and the earlier Finnish mythologists, as Porthan and Ganander, followed the bishop's lead, although Porthan remarked that Ukko's wife was never mentioned in the old songs. It appears probable, however, from the arguments of Castren and others, that Agricola was mistaken on this point. The expression "Ukko's son," which occurs not unfrequently in Finnish poetry, and in the Magic Songs is applied particularly to a wizard, is certainly figurative. I agree with Mr. Abercromby that the club or hammer of Ukko does not symbolise the thunder-bolt, but is a much more humble instru- ment. There is a song in the Kanteletar (ii. 339), in which Ukko is besought by a hunter to swing round his golden club or copper hammer and beat the woods, so as to drive out the game ; and in this case the singer is evidently thinking merely of something like a beater's stick.

I cannot follow the author in his view that Ilmarinen was the old air- and sky-god of the Finns before they ever came in contact with Europeans ; that he subsequently acquired an anthropomor-