Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/118

 our worst enemies was inculcated, at all events many thousand years before the birth of Christ.

As will be at once apparent, it belongs to the epic fairy myth group of the type, beginning with the birth of the hero and something mysterious about that birth. In the details and development of the myth there is not very much to connect it with our Slav myths. The hero, however, as in, , Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes, etc., has his three faithful helpmates, Hures, Hureskutje and Ilmaratje. There is no anti-climax.

The next poem is called the Daughter of the Sun, and is founded on a Lapp superstition that anyone who can embrace her will be wealthy. She appears as a beautiful shiny maiden seated on a rock. Owing to the climate of the Arctic circle, or its proximity to the magnetic pole, or perhaps to both causes together, the hyperborean peoples are liable to hallucinations, whatever that may mean. Only a few years ago a Lapp clergyman saw the Daughter of the Sun seated, stole behind her to embrace her and struck his head against a rock., In the poem the seer succeeds in embracing her; she tells him to follow her, and by no means to look back. He follows, but looks back, and the front of his herd of reindeer disappears. A storm occurs, he looks back again and the middle of the herd become wild reindeer. The Daughter of the Sun then goes home with him and bids him close every chink of his tent. He does so, but the sun still shines through a small crevice, whereupon the Daughter of the Sun kisses him and vanishes. In the morning he looks out of his tent and finds the rest of his herd of reindeer turned to stone, so that it made you shudder to look at them.

This story has nothing very closely in common with our eight Slav myths, except the central figure, so strikingly similar to the figure of the Lorely, or the Maiden of the Miraculous Hair. Those who favour the theory of the separate genesis of similar myths will prefer to see here only a coincidence. In the next poem, however, the points of resemblance between the Lapp and its Slav (Moravian) equivalent are so striking that I shall give the two stories almost in full. They belong to the group of burlesque fairy myths, having their point of origin at the rescue of Plavachek.

The boys and girls used to play and sing, run skipping and wrangle here and there, and leave traces of their feet at the margins of the springs. The Statu prepared his traps of iron, placed them near the water, hid them in the mud. The old Lapp perceived the hidden traps of the eater of men, hid himself in his tight fur coat, and placed himself in the trap of the bear. Statu visits his traps. Aha; the old friend has taken the bait; he is dead here. The Statu takes him home and hangs him to the roof above the smoke. The youngest Statu says: “Look how he whimpers and grunts!” The other (the elder) son: “Thou whimperest and gruntest thyself; not