Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/156

144 Phillpotts makes a far stronger case for Scandinavia than can be made for ancient Greece. It is possible to doubt whether the last scene of the Lay of Helgi Hundingsbane, where Helgi's ghost claims Sigrun to join him in the funeral vault, is a very convincing example of resurrection, and the dead lover's return to claim his still living bride is a theme common to the romantic popular poetry of many countries. But it is seldom that Miss Phillpotts allows zeal to outrun discretion; in general, she shows an admirable and judicial restraint, and is careful to shun the temptations of the Procrustean method.

There is but one serious protest to be made, and that is to the statement that "this ritual points back ultimately to totemism." Totemism is a red herring which has been drawn across many trails to the detriment of progress. In Greece it is certain that there is no sufficient evidence to justify the assumption of a totemic system having ever existed either among the Bronze Age peoples or among the invading Indo-Europeans. I do not know the evidence for Scandinavia, but I suspect Miss Phillpotts, who has not stated it, of lightly assuming an universal totemistic stage of religion. This assumption is, however, quite unwarranted by the evidence, unless so wide a connotation is attached to the word totemism as to deprive it of all practical value, as a definite label of a definite type of social and religious organisation.

In view of the main controversy over the origins of Greek drama, it is interesting to notice the association of Scandinavian drama with grave mounds, though Miss Phillpotts definitely, and I think rightly, denies tomb ritual or the placation of ghosts a primary importance in its development. On the whole, the Scandinavian evidence appears to side with Prof. Ridgeway's opponents. It should, however, be observed that the conditions of the literary problems in Scandinavia and Greece do not exactly coincide. In the older poems of the Edda there is a form of literature, dramatic in character and possessing certain tragic qualities, but in no sense comparable to the dramatic literature, which for us begins full-fledged with Aeschylus. This Northern literature springs directly from its yet ruder prototype, popular ritual drama, and as a form of