Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/32

 18 of memory. Spells and legends formed the greater part of the course, much of which consisted in the learning of verse. No man could become a teacher in less than three years, inapt pupils were at once dismissed, which with constant tests secured efficiency. Besides the Red House there was a School of Star-lore, where priests and chiefs of the highest rank taught the omens, the calendar, proper times and observances connected with feasts, hunting, and the times at which crops should be planted and reaped. The teaching time was always night, the school was under tabu and opened and closed ceremoniously like the Red House. There was also a less formal establishment which one might call a School of Agriculture, where people of all classes learnt the necessary knowledge for the procuring of vegetable food, and the incantations which secured good supplies.

We have both in the Irish and Maori tales many examples of the regular formulae that helped the reciter, just as the formal lines that so often recur in the Homeric poems and the Chansons de geste, descriptive of common operations, helped the rhapsode and the trouvere.

Among the Eddic poems we find examples of the poetic Dialogue, a form of didactic composition dating from the last days of Scandinavian heathendom in the ninth century, giving instruction of the kind then deemed most important. These poems prove that the Scandinavians had also their method of handing down folklore, though there were no Medicine-men or Druids in the heathen North, and though Scandinavia was never greatly given to regular superstitions, admodum dedita religionibus, like the Gaul of Cæsar's time.

What comes out of all this (and there is much more that could be said on these archaic arrangements for securing the correct transmission of knowledge and science without the use of letters) is that, unless interrupted by a revolution, such as the incoming of new religion and culture,