Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/571

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are following is the daughter of a magician, who has plenty of everything, but be values his daughter but little less than wampum. He wore a cap of wampum, which was attached to his scalp; but powerful Indians, warriors of a distant chief, came and told him that their chief's daughter was on the brink of the grave, and she herself requested his scalp of wampum to effect a cure. . . . The warrior's coming for it was only a cheat, and they now are constantly making sport of it, dancing it about from village to village; and on every insult it receives, the old man groans from pain. . . . The Red Swan has enticed many a young man, as she has done you, in order to get them to procure it, and whoever is the fortunate one that succeeds will receive the Red Swan as his reward.

This is the key-note of the tale. The youth by magic assumes various forms—a humming-bird, a bit of floating down, a hawk—secures the scalp and restores it to the old magician who immediately becomes a young man and ultimately bestows upon his benefactor a maiden of wondrous beauty, the erstwhile Eed Swan.

This tale has in it many points of resemblance to a Mabinogi. In the old Welsh story of Kilhwch and Olwen, for example, there is the same overcoming of difficulties by means of magic, the same transformation of men into animals and objects of nature, the same gaining of some object of vital importance, and the ultimate bestowal of the prize—a maiden of radiant beauty—upon the successful one. There is much circumlocution and repetition in all of these primitive tales. The difference seems mainly in the setting—the environmental influence, one may call it—not in the substance of the tales themselves.

In the Dakota legend of Strong Desires and the Eed Sorcerer we have the story of a youth (it is always youth that figures so heroically in these tales, both Celtic and American) taunted for his timidity, who becomes master of himself by accomplishing the death of an evil spirit in human guise, and who gains his end through the same magical influences that are woven so closely with all the events that take place in this strange world of the past. So in other of these aboriginal American folk tales—The Vanishing Little Men (the origin of the fairy people), The White Feather, The Magic Bundle, The Enchanted Moccasins, The White Stone Canoe, The Summer Maker, to quote but a few in passing, one is impressed with their close similarity to the Celtic cultus. In many of the Welsh tales and in such old Irish stories as the Fate of the Children of Lir and The Fate of the Children of Turrenn, there is the same changing of men and women into beasts and birds that one finds so often in the tales of American aborigines. Many of these tales, in fact, belong to that class of curious beast stories that are so widely spread in the culture of all primitive folk. There is hardly a story in which an animal of some kind, with human attributes, does not appear. Men pass into animals or animals take on the speech and ways of men as a matter of course in this land of enchantment. In both the Celtic and American stories, too, there are men of heroic figure. Manabozho, the Hiawatha of the Iroquois, while given, as related