Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/191

 Some Mythical Tales of the Lapps 1 8 \

warns them that she and her family will devour them. The Son of Peive replies that Sar-akka, the Birth-goddess, has given him tough muscles and great strength, derived both from father and mother, and that Uks-akka, another Birth-goddess, mingling in his mother's milk, has filled him with understanding. He has come to seek a help-mate and wife. The giant's daughter thereupon falls in love with him, and goes to inform her father. The blind giant intends to devour the Son of Peive, but first he challenges him to a wrestling bout, and bids him stretch out his hands, that he may feel how strong they are. His daughter, alarmed on the hero's account, gives him an iron anchor, which he holds out to the giant. The blind ogre, on feeling it, remarks that the fingers of the Sons of Peive are exceedingly hard. Then the hero, by the girl's advice, offers her father, as betrothal gifts, a cask of oil and a cask of tar to drink, and a horse to eat.^ The giant soon becomes intoxicated, and, after vainly grasping and wrestling with the anchor, bids them sit down, and signifies their betrothal by scratching their little fingers and mixing the blood, and certain knots are then tied, which it was the Lappish custom to tie on betrothal, and to undo after the marriage had been consummated. The giant gives his daughter for dowry gold and silver fragments torn froni the cliffs of Giant-land. She also bears away from her old home, in her lover's boat, three locked pine-wood chests, red, white and blue.

" Death was there, and Peace, and Warfare, Fire and Blood and Plague and Sickness, And the towels, trebly knotted. Of Sar-, Uks- and Mader-akka, Breeze, and gale and roaring tempest." ^

1889), p. 318.
 * Cf. a Finnish tale quoted in Folk Tales of the Magyars (London (F. L. S. ),

"Mader-akka, "Old Earth woman," had three daughters, Sar-akka, Juks-akk, and Uksa-akka, "old Birth-woman," "old Bow-woman" and