Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/431

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whose collections are here represented, spent two years in that country, and lived nearly ten months in 1903-4 amongst the people who roam between 76 and 78 degrees of north latitude. The beliefs and stories gathered, principally from these northern nomads, closely resemble those already recorded by Rink in Danish Greenland and Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, by Nansen in Eskimo Life, and by Egede and other older writers. The Eskimo, like many other peoples, claim to have come up out of the earth, and add that their indispensable dogs also sprang out of little mounds. At first there was no death and no daylight. The people grew too many, and a flood diminished their number. Rink {Tales, p. 38), regards his similar stories as possibly borrowed, but Mr. Rasmussen's repetition confirms their native origin. Light and death came together, but the story told by Egede, of the snake (?) and louse who race to man with contradictory news that he shall live for ever, and that he shall die, is told here (p. 161) as a mere race between worm and louse to reach man and feed on him. " When the first man died, they covered up the corpse with stones. But the body came back ; it did not properly understand how to die" (p. 10 1), and had to be pushed back by an old woman. " With Death came the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. For when people die, they go up to Heaven and grow luminous." The moon, by the way, is male, as amongst the Andamanese, Japanese, etc. Other races than the Eskimo are derived from the marriage of a girl and dog, and this may be, as Rink suggests about his version, a recol- lection of Amerindian myths of a dog ancestor. Mr. Rasmussen agrees with Rink and Nansen, that man is considered to have three parts, — body, soul, and name. Animals too have souls, and precautions are taken to avert danger from the soul of a slain bear, by hanging offerings over its snout. These offerings include a few bits of skin for patching boots, because " bears walk so much." Various means are taken to guard against the evil which remains behind in a corpse after death. Numerous tabus must be obeyed for five days, — five being the highest number for which the Eskimo has a special word, — and during the funeral ceremonies the left nostril is plugged with straw to