Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/319

Rh that point. Unfortunately, it is impossible to determine solely by an à priori argument which survivals have a length S Z and which a length V Z. The difficulty lies in deciding whether the mental state of people between the periods S and V had been at such a standstill that the author of an origin in the latter period thought exactly as if he had lived in the former period, or whether he was merely imitating an old type when giving expression to a whimsical fancy with full consciousness that it was so. For it cannot be doubted that the Finns in their mental creations of later times, after contact with more civilised peoples, did employ tropes and metaphors in their poetry merely as ornament, without intending them to be taken literally. The wide diffusion and popularity of riddles also proves that very quaint metaphors were in the mouths of the people, who used them in joke, and not in earnest. A regular law, too, of development requires a transition period between the strange beliefs they must have held before they occupied Finland, and those which they hold now. During such a stage, some persons would take a marvellous statement as matter of fact ; others, possessed of more insight, would understand it as a humorous or poetical figure of speech. Though à priori reasoning is unavailing by itself, yet, combined with other data, we are sometimes able to assign to some origin-stories an approximate date. Taking into consideration that, in the life and imagination of a race of hunters like the early Finns, animals must have played a greater rôle than they did in later times, we may perhaps assume this : that, when an animal origin is ascribed to a subject in some stories, and a non-animal origin in others of similar type, the former belongs to a rather older stratum of thought, or to a survival of greater length. For instance: 1. In one version of the cowhouse snake's origin (41d) this is attributed to the slaver of a