Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/370

 38 yournal of American Folk-Lore.

Another item of zoological folk-lore still extant is the hibernation of swallows in the dark recesses of caves, or at the bottom of ponds and pools. Pliny 1 recognized the fact of the migration of swallows, and does not mention a belief on the part of any one in their hiber- nation. Following those classic letters constituting the " Natural His- tory of Selborne," we find that Gilbert White, who united the imagina- tion of the poet with the patience and accuracy of the naturalist, was troubled for twenty years with the question of the hibernation of swallows. At one time he believes in migration, but then a report from " a man of great veracity " comes in, and White's mind is turned toward hibernation. So back and forth sways belief until finally he is convinced in favor of hibernation by the following argu- ment : " There is a circumstance respecting the color of swifts which seems not to be unworthy our attention. When they arrive in spring they are all over of a glossy, dark, soot-color, except their chins, which are white ; but by being all day long in the sun and air, they become quite weather-beaten and bleached before they depart, and yet they turn glossy again in the spring. Now ; if they pursue the sun into lower latitudes, as some suppose, in order to enjoy a perpetual summer, why do they not return bleached ? Do they not rather perhaps retire to rest for a season, and at that junc- ture molt and change their feathers, since all other birds are known to molt soon after the season of breeding ? " In Sweden 2 the swal- lows remain until late in the fall, when they become gregarious, often appearing in countless numbers near some body of water. In the dead of the night they all disappear, and so the folk believe they are at the bottom of the water, to remain under the ice during the cold weather.

The swallow as the harbinger of spring has been regarded as a propitious omen from Aryan times up to the present. But in the gloom of winter this bird disappears, and then, like all forms of the evil one, works in darkness. It is the old antithesis of the Veda, which has reappeared in Hellenic myths, the sagas of the Northmen, and the folk-lore of the present. The powers of day are in eternally recurrent warfare against those of night. The solar hero, bold, strong, and beautiful, at dawn breaks away from the foul hosts who, having captured him in the evening twilight, have kept him impris- oned in the dungeons of the nether world. Under the spell of this myth the folk have given erroneous interpretations of many natural phenomena. The belief in the hibernation of the swallows may be the atavistic reappearance of the ancestral Aryan conception of this swallowing up of the light by darkness.

1 Natural History, book x. chap. 34. Bohn's ed. 1855.

2 From Dr. Josua Lindahl.

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