Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/432

 2,yS Revieivs.

secure a long life. Things left on a grave may be taken away for use, if replaced by miniature models of the objects taken. Tabus are also laid at childbirth, and food tabus exist for the benefit of the seniors.

The stories do not throw any new light on the vexed question of the origin of the Eskimo, though their identity in many cases with tales from Labrador and from Alaska shows the unity of the Eskimo race. Nansen, fortified by citations from the collections of Prof. Moltke Moe, argued that the Greenlanders had derived many traditions from the ancient Scandinavians, although the latter had left very trifling traces in the Eskimo tongue. The only support to this theory given by the present collection is in a story with a reminiscence of "Big Klaus and Little Klaus," which ends (p. 187), — "This story we have from the days of our ancestors. It is very old, and dates from the time when people were many and had white men amongst them." Some information is given, however, about the transmission of tales. Two stories are said by their tellers to have been heard from people who had crossed the sea, and on pp. 62 et seq. we have, in the words of a survivor, the fascinating narrative of this tribal migration of fifty years ago. An old magician led a party of 38, reduced after two winters by desertions to 14, from the country about Baffinsland to Smith Sound. After a six-years' stay, in which they taught their hosts the arts of building kayaks and shooting with bows and arrows, their leader longed for his old home, and most of the party started to return; but the aged magician died in the first winter, and after terrible hardships a remnant struggled back to " The New People." Such travels perhaps explain why, for example, a Bluebeard story of a man who fattens and kills a succession of wives, told here from Smith Sound, was found by another collector in Labrador.

One group of the present stories explains the origin of things, — of sun and moon, the planet Venus (" he who stands and listens"), the Great Bear (from a bear chased by dogs), the narwhal (from a deceiving mother), black pteropods (from the raven), and fog. Other stories tell of giants, man-eaters, avenging ghosts, weird inland beings and beasts, soul flights,