Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/320

312 wolf running along the ice, which fell on a pike swimming under the ice. The slaver drifts ashore, is picked up by a girl, and carried to a cowhouse, where it becomes a snake. 2. In one version of the snake's origin (11a) this is attributed to the saliva which fell from the mouth of a sleeping Hiisi, or Devil. An ogress swallows it, and finding it too hot, spits it out on the sea. It drifts ashore, is hardened into a spiral form, and then Hiisi gives it life. 3. A fir-tree also originates from the hair of a wolf running along the ice, from the tooth of a pike swimming under the ice. A hair falls off, a girl picks it up and plants it, with the root-end in the ground. It then turns into a fir (23c). 4. In a variant (23d), a fir-tree originates from the tooth of a pike caught by a son of the Death-god. The tooth falls on the grass, and from it grew a fir. 5. On the other hand, an oak (22d) originates from the tooth of a comb, or the bristle of a brush which broke off while a dark, shaven-headed girl was combing and brushing her hair. As the word for oak is a loan-word from a Slav language, as the conception savours more of home than of forest life, and the more modern brush is introduced, as well as the older comb, there is some reason for considering this fifth story younger than the third and fourth. From the similarity of the opening, and the animal-origin common to both, the first and third may be considered older than the second. From a general likeness between the third and fourth, they may be classed together, and, therefore, with the first, all which are therefore older than the second and fifth. But the word for cowhouse-snake in the first is a Russian loan-word, and probably the notion of a cow-house-snake as well. So the third and fourth will not be older than when this borrowing took place, and all the five origins, though they belong to two or three periods, are none of them really archaic, though the lengths of their survivals may be measured by hundreds of years.