Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/454

 414 The Folklore in the Legends of the Pmijah.

Of the same nature in Indian story as the ogre is the nag or serpent, this important fact being strongly empha- sised in the Legends, in which the serpents and their doings occupy a prominent place. They here, though not in ordinary belief, appear just as ordinary heroes, and are distinctly human in their personalities and all their ways, as often appearing in human as in other forms. They are servants to the hero's patron saint ; they live in human dwellings and show hospitality to human heroes ; they are subject to human diseases ; they give their daughters to, and marry the daughters of, human neighbours. They are divided into families, and like ogres they live on human fiesh. Like the rest of the heroic or supernatural world, they have a wide power of metamorphosis: into and out of human or serpent form, into many animal forms and into a variety of things, such as fruit, a fine needle, a golden staff, a blade of grass. In the same way they have an almost unlimited power of working miracles, chiefly malevolent ; destroying life in various ways, setting on fire and scorch- ing with their breath, or bite, or by the flash of their eyes, and drinking up the life of another. But they have an equally pronounced power of restoration to life, ordinarily by the recognised folk-tale methods. And, lastly, apart from being frequently " winged," they have the usual heroic powers of rapid and miraculous movement.

Now, the notions exhibited in these modern legends on the Naga serpents go back a long way in Indian story ; and I think it a fair inference to draw from them and their prototypes, that Indian serpent-legends are but a memory surviving in an ignorant and superstitious peasantry of an old life-struggle between the Aryan population and the perhaps aboriginal Naga peoples, whose totem, so to speak, or even merely national fighting emblem or standard, has, it may be, become confused with the race.

From the ogre and the iidga one passes almost imper- ceptibly to the humanised animal that appears so constantly