Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/407

 Rh account for this fact? It seems to confront us with a problem quite different from any other in connection with the study of folk-lore on this continent. Besides these close resemblances in the legends of the two races, there are ideas held by both which discover remarkable likenesses to the best authenticated folk-tales of the old world. In the Kalevala, the great Finnic epic, perhaps the richest find of folk-lore in the last fifty years, are embalmed the thoughts of men as they probably were thousands of years ago. We find here marvellous resemblances to the Chaldean invocations preserved on clay tablets, to the beliefs of the ancient Babylonians, and stranger still, to those of the American Indian—yet the Kalevala is self-dependent and original, and the idea of its being a copy or imitation is positively denied by scientific authorities.

We find in it a rune which deals in a serio-comic manner with Otso, the bear, in much the same way as our negroes do in their legends. We find another in which the hare is given the place of honor above the bear, the wolf, and the fox, for its superior sagacity and adroitness. If the Kalevala, together with the results of philological research should prove, as seems quite possible, that the American Indian is related to the Finns; and if identical legends, ideas, and linguistic peculiarities demonstrate that two of the most primitive races on this continent, the Afro-American and Indian, are distant cousins,—a new and very attractive thought will be presented to the patriotic American.

According to the general idea, at the time of the dispersion of the human family from its home in Central Asia, some of the tribes journeyed eastward and crossed, probably on dry ground, the present Behring Straits. When others went southward from Asia to the Dark Continent, and others again went westward to the country of the Lapps and the Finns and the Saxons and at last to our own shores, they must, have carried, stored away with their Lares and Penates, a chain of primitive legends. Is it chimerical to suggest that the two ends of this wondrous chain, with its curiously wrought links, are destined to meet in the land discovered by Columbus? Is it chimerical to suggest that we may realize that a chain of legends has at last girdled the globe with its romance as