Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/125

 This curious legend, which does not tend to raise one’s opinion either of Christian honesty or of the sublimity of Christian imagination—we are a long way from the Herald’s speech in the Lapp pagan poem—seems to show a consciousness of what was probably the case, that our primitive ancestors were flat-footed, as many negro races and the anthropoid apes are to this day (Lombroso). If so, just as Erlik in the Siberian legend helped semi-simian humanity out of its monkey-fleeces to higher things, so this Serbian devil was no inconsiderable stepping-stone in the triumphant upward march of human evolution.

The next story—the Woman of the Sea from Naessebegy—is one of that large class of which El Granchio (the crab), and a Slavonic one, the Frog, are examples. The hero is conducted to a palace under the sea by a mermaid, and presented with a heap of silver and a large golden cup, which once stood on the table of a king. These stories seem to be expansions of the third task in the three days’ struggle for the light, when the hero fishes up a gold ring from the bottom of a black sea with the help of a pike or a boon companion.

The third story is called the Poor Boy, the Devil, and the City of Gold (from Karasjok). A poor and a rich man go out fishing; the rich man is fortunate, the poor man catches nothing. Then he hears a voice: “Promise me what your wife carries under the heart and you shall be rich” [Jephthah’s daughter: El mezo (Venetian) etc.]. The man catches a fish full of gold coins, and makes his fortune. He finds his wife enceinte. Fifteen years after the devil comes and claims the boy. The rest of the story is one of the innumerable variants of the Three Citrons—the three volume novel form of fairy story. Taking it all together, it belongs therefore to the epic fairy story type, beginning as it does with the birth of the hero, and something miraculous connected with it.

We have now compared the principal fragments of ancient Lapp literature with the Slavonic folk-lore, and have shewn beyond the possibility of cavil how close is the connection between the two.

In conclusion, a few words may be said of the Lapp superstitions, which may perhaps be traced in our Slav variants of Lapp nature myths. They are not very numerous, perhaps, in part because the records of Lapp mythology are few and rapidly perishing.

1. When the noaide’s, or Lapp magician’s soul, during the mesmeric trance passed into Saivvo, the subterranean Lapp elysium, it was conducted by a Saivvo-bird or fish. The fish was either piscine or vermiform. In the Venetian variant (El Mezo) of the Polish Hloupy Piecuch, the wonder-working pike is exchanged for an equally thaumaturgic eel. A reminiscence of the primitive Lapp idea may perhaps have contributed to the choice of pike and eels, as well as to the serpent in the story of Golden Locks.

2. Originally the Lapps adored the sun, and a fragment of the ancient belief is preserved to this day in the custom of smearing the walls of the round hut with butter, that the sun may melt it after