Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/193

 Souie Mythical Tales of the Lapps 183

that she was the ancestress of many illustrious men, of whom King Charles XII. was one.^

In the ancient series of tales, gathered mainly from Fjellner, concerning the daughter of the Sun and the daughter of the Moon, we recognize, as Professor Moltke Moe has observed,^ the fragmentary remains of a sort of national epic. These compositions, couched in a kind of rhythmical prose which now and then rises into regular trochaic verse, portray the early development of man, and particularly of the Laplander. They describe his progress since the days of the Golden Age, when all the springs flowed with milk, and nobody had any need to work. Violence and Crime put an end to this happy state. Then men hunted and killed reindeer ; but, when they had caught them, they slew them at once ; it was far too much trouble to tame them.

Njavvis and Attjis hunted and caught reindeer. They established marriage, binding their wives by sacred oaths. ^ The wife of Njavvis, Njavvis-ene,^ was a daughter of the Sun ; the wife of Attjis, Attjis-ene, was a daughter of the Moon. Both Njavvis and Attjis were murdered, and, at the time of their murder, their two wives were both preg- nant. Their widows did not fish nor hunt, but they tethered the reindeer that were caught, and looked after them, and tamed them. And because the reindeer were tamed by women, women have always had the largest share of the herd.'^ But men first hunted and caught

' Donner, pp. 61-82.

^ In his introduction to Lappiskc Evenlyr og Folkcsagii, by Q. Qvigstad and G. Sandberg (Christiania, 1887), p. xx. This introduction is a valuable essay on the diffusion of folk-tales.

•'E. Weslermarck, History of Human Marriage (London, 1894), p. 9.


 * ene or ^-^///i; = mother, wife.

'"As soon as the new-born Babe is Baptised," says Tornaeus, "if it be a girl, the I'arents present her with a She Reindeer Calf, and put her mark on its horns." So soon as she gets the first tooth, they give her another, calhd Pannixcis, i.e. the Tooth Reindeer. These reindeer are carefully kept, and