Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/419

 Myths from the Gilbert Islands. 1 1 1

" When Samoa was finished, Na Arean went north and made the land of Tarawa with its people." The names of the first man and his wife are given.

This does not yet exhaust the tale. In the company of Fools and Deaf-mutes, who were the offspring of Na Atlbu and his wife Te Akea, we almost certainly have another stratum of human ancestors. Many Gilbertese families trace their descent from beings of this class, whose names up and down the (jroup arc legion. According to the majority of accounts the Fools and Deaf-mutes were formless beings, without arms, legs or organs, until touched by the miraculous hand of Na Arean. We have already seen how their " father " Na Atibu has strong affinities with the formless [i.e. armless, legless and headless) original being of Nias myth, and this is evidently their link with Indonesia. But they have also strong relations with Polynesia. In their capacity of assistants in the raising of heaven they remind us of the plants, which, according to a Samoan tradition, pushed the skies up from earth ; ^ by the name Bakatoko— supports — which is often given to them, they not only again recall the Samoan story, but associate themselves with those supports of Marquesan myth — " the great and the small ... the crooked and the bent . . . innumerable and endless supports " ^ — which were evolved in original night ; and in the innumerable positions which Gilbertese traditions ascribe to them, as they lay between heaven and earth, they reflect the condition of the children of Rangi and Papa, whom a Maori myth pictures as crawling, upright, bent, doubled up, and so on, between the sky-father and the earth-mother.^

Finally, I have an account of the Fools and Deaf-mutes

1 Turner, op. cit. p. 198.

- Von den Steinen, Verhandlungen d. Gesellsch. f. Erdkiinde z. Berlin, vol. XXV. p. 506 (1898).

3 Smith, " The Lore of the Whare-wananga," Memoirs of the Poly- nesian Society, iii. 117.