Custom and Myth 10
Apparently Mr. Brown thinks it not too rash to infer that the Cappadocian
use of the word 'moly' is not derived from the Greeks, but from the
Accadians. Now in Accadian, according to Mr. Brown, mul means 'star.'
'Hence ulu or mulu = [Greek], the mysterious Homerik counter-charm to the
charms of Kirke' (p. 60). Mr. Brown's theory, therefore, is that moly
originally meant 'star.' Circe is the moon, Odysseus is the sun, and
'what _watches over_ the solar hero at night when exposed to the hostile
lunar power, but the stars?' especially the dog-star.
The truth is, that Homer's moly, whatever plant he meant by the name, is
only one of the magical herbs in which most peoples believe or have
believed. Like the Scottish rowan, or like St. John's wort, it is potent
against evil influences. People have their own simple reasons for
believing in these plants, and have not needed to bring down their
humble, early botany from the clouds and stars. We have to imagine, on
the other hand (if we follow Mr. Brown), that in some unknown past the
Cappadocians turned the Accadian word for a star into a local name of a
plant, that this word reached Homer, that the supposed old Accadian myth
of the star which watches over the solar hero retained its vitality in
Greek, and leaving the star clung to the herb, that Homer used an 'Akkado-
Kappadokian' myth, and that, many ages after, the Accadian star-name in
its perverted sense of 'rue' survived in Cappadocia. This structure of
argument is based on tablets which even Prof. Sayce cannot read, and on
possibilities about the alliances of tongues concerning which we 'know
next to nothing.' A method which leaves on one side the common, natural,
widely-diffused beliefs about the magic virtue of herbs (beliefs which we
have seen at work in Kensington and in Central Africa), to hunt for moly
among stars and undeciphered Kappadokian inscriptions, seems a dubious
method. We have examined it at full length because it is a specimen of
an erudite, but, as we think, a mistaken way in folklore. M. Halevy's
warnings against the shifting mythical theories based on sciences so new
as the lore of Assyria and 'Akkadia' are by no means superfluous.
'Akkadian' is rapidly become as ready a key to all locks as 'Aryan' was a
few years ago.
'KALEVALA'; OR, THE FINNISH NATIONAL EPIC.
It is difficult to account for the fact that the scientific curiosity
which is just now so busy in examining all the monuments of the primitive
condition of our race, should, in England at least, have almost totally
neglected to popularise the 'Kalevala,' or national poem of the Finns.
Besides its fresh and simple beauty of style, its worth as a storehouse
of every kind of primitive folklore, being as it is the production of an
Urvolk, a nation that has undergone no violent revolution in language or
institutions--the 'Kalevala' has the peculiar interest of occupying a
position between the two kinds of primitive poetry, the ballad and the
epic. So much difficulty has been introduced into the study of the first
developments of song, by confusing these distinct sorts of composition
under the name of popular poetry, that it may be well, in writing of a
poem which occupies a middle place between epic and ballad, to define
what we mean by each.
The author of our old English 'Art of Poesie' begins his work with a
statement which may serve as a text: 'Poesie,' says Puttenham, writing in
1589, 'is more ancient than the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines,
coming by instinct of nature, and used by the savage and uncivill, who
were before all science and civilitie. This is proved by certificate of
merchants and travellers, who by late navigations have surveyed the whole
world, and discovered large countries, and strange people, wild and
savage, affirming that the American, the Perusine, and the very
canniball, do sing, and also say, their highest and holiest matters in
certain riming versicles.' Puttenham is here referring to that instinct
of primitive men, which compels them in all moments of high-wrought
feeling, and on all solemn occasions, to give utterance to a kind of
chant. {157a} Such a chant is the song of Lamech, when he had 'slain a
man to his wounding.' So in the Norse sagas, Grettir and Gunnar _sing_
when they have anything particular to say; and so in the Marchen--the
primitive fairy tales of all nations--scraps of verse are introduced
where emphasis is wanted. This craving for passionate __EXPRESSION__ takes a
more formal shape in the lays which, among all primitive peoples, as
among the modern Greeks to-day, {157b} are sung at betrothals, funerals,
and departures for distant lands. These songs have been collected in
Scotland by Scott and Motherwell; their Danish counterparts have been
translated by Mr. Prior. In Greece, M. Fauriel and Dr. Ulrichs; in
Provence, Damase Arbaud; in Italy, M. Nigra; in Servia, Talvj; in France,
Gerard de Nerval--have done for their separate countries what Scott did
for the Border. Professor Child, of Harvard, is publishing a beautiful
critical collection of English Volkslieder, with all known variants from
every country.
A comparison of the collections proves that among all European lands the
primitive 'versicles' of the people are identical in tone, form, and
incident. It is this kind of early __EXPRESSION__ of a people's
life--careless, abrupt, brief, as was necessitated by the fact that they
were sung to the accompaniment of the dance--that we call ballads. These
are distinctly, and in every sense, popular poems, and nothing can cause
greater confusion than to apply the same title, 'popular,' to early epic
poetry. Ballads are short; a long ballad, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has
said, creeps and halts. A true epic, on the other hand, is long, and its
tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the
form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher laisse of
the French chansons de geste, is full of conscious and admirable art.
Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in
vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite
station, _whose descendants are still in the land_, whose home is a
recognisable place, Ithaca, or Argos. Now, though these two kinds of
early poetry--the ballad, the song of the people; the epic, the song of
the chiefs of the people, of the ruling race--are distinct in kind, it
does not follow that they have no connection, that the nobler may not
have been developed out of the materials of the lower form of __EXPRESSION__.
And the value of the 'Kalevala' is partly this, that it combines the
continuity and unison of the epic with the simplicity and popularity of
the ballad, and so forms a kind of link in the history of the development
of poetry. This may become clearer as we proceed to explain the literary
history of the Finnish national poem.
Sixty years ago, it may be said, no one was aware that Finland possessed
a national poem at all. Her people--who claim affinity with the Magyars
of Hungary, but are possibly a back-wave of an earlier tide of
population--had remained untouched by foreign influences since their
conquest by Sweden, and their somewhat lax and wholesale conversion to
Christianity: events which took place gradually between the middle of the
twelfth and the end of the thirteenth centuries. Under the rule of
Sweden, the Finns were left to their quiet life and undisturbed
imaginings, among the forests and lakes of the region which they aptly
called Pohja, 'the end of things'; while their educated classes took no
very keen interest in the native poetry and mythology of their race. At
length the annexation of Finland by Russia, in 1809, awakened national
feeling, and stimulated research into the songs and customs which were
the heirlooms of the people.
It was the policy of Russia to encourage, rather than to check, this
return on a distant past; and from the north of Norway to the slopes of
the Altai, ardent explorers sought out the fragments of unwritten early
poetry. These runes, or Runots, were chiefly sung by old men called
Runoias, to beguile the weariness of the long dark winters. The custom
was for two champions to engage in a contest of memory, clasping each
other's hands, and reciting in turn till he whose memory first gave in
slackened his hold. The 'Kalevala' contains an instance of this
practice, where it is said that no one was so hardy as to clasp hands
with Wainamoinen, who is at once the Orpheus and the Prometheus of
Finnish mythology. These Runoias, or rhapsodists, complain, of course,
of the degeneracy of human memory; they notice how any foreign influence,
in religion or politics, is destructive to the native songs of a race.
{160} 'As for the lays of old time, a thousand have been scattered to
the wind, a thousand buried in the snow; . . . as for those which the
Munks (the Teutonic knights) swept away, and the prayer of the priest
overwhelmed, a thousand tongues were not able to recount them.' In spite
of the losses thus caused, and in spite of the suspicious character of
the Finns, which often made the task of collection a dangerous one,
enough materials remained to furnish Dr. Lonnrot, the most noted
explorer, with thirty-five Runots, or cantos. These were published in
1835, but later research produced the fifteen cantos which make up the
symmetrical fifty of the 'Kalevala.' In the task of arranging and
uniting these, Dr. Lonnrot played the part traditionally ascribed to the
commission of Pisistratus in relation to the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' Dr.
Lonnrot is said to have handled with singular fidelity the materials
which now come before us as one poem, not absolutely without a certain
unity and continuous thread of narrative. It is this unity (so faint
compared with that of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey') which gives the
'Kalevala' a claim to the title of epic.
It cannot be doubted that, at whatever period the Homeric poems took
shape in Greece, they were believed to record the feats of the supposed
ancestors of existing families. Thus, for example, Pisistratus, as a
descendant of the Nelidae, had an interest in securing certain parts, at
least, of the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' from oblivion. The same family
pride embellished and preserved the epic poetry of early France. There
were in France but three heroic houses, or gestes; and three
corresponding cycles of epopees. Now, in the 'Kalevala,' there is no
trace of the influence of family feeling; it was no one's peculiar care
and pride to watch over the records of the fame of this or that hero. The
poem begins with a cosmogony as wild as any Indian dream of creation; and
the human characters who move in the story are shadowy inhabitants of no
very definite lands, whom no family claim as their forefathers. The very
want of this idea of family and aristocratic pride gives the 'Kalevala' a
unique place among epics. It is emphatically an epic of the people, of
that class whose life contains no element of progress, no break in
continuity; which from age to age preserves, in solitude and close
communion with nature, the earliest beliefs of grey antiquity. The Greek
epic, on the other hand, has, as M. Preller {161} points out, 'nothing to
do with natural man, but with an ideal world of heroes, with sons of the
gods, with consecrated kings, heroes, elders, _a kind of specific race of
men_. The people exist only as subsidiary to the great houses, as a mere
background against which stand out the shining figures of heroes; as a
race of beings fresh and rough from the hands of nature, with whom, and
with whose concerns, the great houses and their bards have little
concern.' This feeling--so universal in Greece, and in the feudal
countries of mediaeval Europe, that there are two kinds of men, the
golden and the brazen race, as Plato would have called them--is absent,
with all its results, in the 'Kalevala.'
Among the Finns we find no trace of an aristocracy; there is scarcely a
mention of kings, or priests; the heroes of the poem are really popular
heroes, fishers, smiths, husbandmen, 'medicine-men,' or wizards;
exaggerated shadows of the people, pursuing on a heroic scale, not war,
but the common daily business of primitive and peaceful men. In
recording their adventures, the 'Kalevala,' like the shield of Achilles,
reflects all the life of a race, the feasts, the funerals, the rites of
seed-time and harvest of marriage and death, the hymn, and the magical
incantation. Were this all, the epic would only have the value of an
exhaustive collection of the popular ballads which, as we have seen, are
a poetical record of the intenser moments in the existence of
unsophisticated tribes. But the 'Kalevala' is distinguished from such a
collection, by presenting the ballads as they are produced by the events
of a continuous narrative, and thus it takes a distinct place between the
aristocratic epics of Greece, or of the Franks, and the scattered songs
which have been collected in Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, and
Italy.
Besides the interest of its unique position as a popular epic, the
'Kalevala' is very valuable, both for its literary beauties and for the
confused mass of folklore which it contains.
Here old cosmogonies, attempts of man to represent to himself the
beginning of things, are mingled with the same wild imaginings as are
found everywhere in the shape of fairy-tales. We are hurried from an
account of the mystic egg of creation, to a hymn like that of the
Ambarval Brothers, to a strangely familiar scrap of a nursery story, to
an incident which we remember as occurring in almost identical words in a
Scotch ballad. We are among a people which endows everything with human
characters and life, which is in familiar relations with birds, and
beasts, and even with rocks and plants. Ravens and wolves and fishes of
the sea, sun, moon, and stars, are kindly or churlish; drops of blood
find speech, man and maid change to snake or swan and resume their forms,
ships have magic powers, like the ships of the Phaeacians.
Then there is the oddest confusion of every stage of religious
development: we find a supreme God, delighting in righteousness; Ukko,
the lord of the vault of air, who stands apart from men, and sends his
son, Wainamoinen, to be their teacher in music and agriculture.
Across this faith comes a religion of petrified abstractions like those
of the Roman Pantheon. There are gods of colour, a goddess of weaving, a
goddess of man's blood, besides elemental spirits of woods and waters,
and the manes of the dead. Meanwhile, the working faith of the people is
the belief in magic--generally a sign of the lower culture. It is
supposed that the knowledge of certain magic words gives power over the
elemental bodies which obey them; it is held that the will of a distant
sorcerer can cross the lakes and plains like the breath of a fantastic
frost, with power to change an enemy to ice or stone. Traces remain of
the worship of animals: there is a hymn to the bear; a dance like the
bear-dance of the American Indians; and another hymn tells of the birth
and power of the serpent. Across all, and closing all, comes a hostile
account of the origin of Christianity--the end of joy and music.
How primitive was the condition of the authors of this medley of beliefs
is best proved by the survival of the custom called exogamy. {164a} This
custom, which is not peculiar to the Finns, but is probably a universal
note of early society, prohibits marriage between members of the same
tribe. Consequently, the main action, such as it is, of the 'Kalevala'
turns on the efforts made by the men of Kaleva to obtain brides from the
hostile tribe of Pohja. {164b}
Further proof of ancient origin is to be found in what is the great
literary beauty of the poem--its pure spontaneity and simplicity. It is
the production of an intensely imaginative race, to which song came as
the most natural __EXPRESSION__ of joy and sorrow, terror or triumph--a class
which lay near to nature's secret, and was not out of sympathy with the
wild kin of woods and waters.
'These songs,' says the prelude, 'were found by the wayside, and
gathered in the depths of the copses; blown from the branches of the
forest, and culled among the plumes of the pine-trees. These lays
came to me as I followed the flocks, in a land of meadows honey-sweet,
and of golden hills. . . . The cold has spoken to me, and the rain
has told me her runes; the winds of heaven, the waves of the sea, have
spoken and sung to me; the wild birds have taught me, the music of
many waters has been my master.'
The metre in which the epic is chanted resembles, to an English ear, that
of Mr. Longfellow's 'Hiawatha'--there is assonance rather than rhyme; and
a very musical effect is produced by the liquid character of the
language, and by the frequent alliterations.
This rough outline of the main characteristics of the 'Kalevala' we shall
now try to fill up with an abstract of its contents. The poem is longer
than the 'Iliad,' and much of interest must necessarily be omitted; but
it is only through such an abstract that any idea can be given of the
sort of unity which does prevail amid the most utter discrepancy.
In the first place, what is to be understood by the word 'Kalevala'? The
affix la signifies 'abode.' Thus, 'Tuonela' is 'the abode of Tuoni,' the
god of the lower world; and as 'kaleva' means 'heroic,' 'magnificent,'
'Kalevala' is 'The Home of Heroes.' The poem is the record of the
adventures of the people of Kalevala--of their strife with the men of
Pohjola, the place of the world's end. We may fancy two old Runoias, or
singers, clasping hands on one of the first nights of the Finnish winter,
and beginning (what probably has never been accomplished) the attempt to
work through the 'Kalevala' before the return of summer. They commence
ab ovo, or, rather, before the egg. First is chanted the birth of
Wainamoinen, the benefactor and teacher of men. He is the son of
Luonnotar, the daughter of Nature, who answers to the first woman of the
Iroquois cosmogony. Beneath the breath and touch of wind and tide, she
conceived a child; but nine ages of man passed before his birth, while
the mother floated on 'the formless and the multiform waters.' Then
Ukko, the supreme God, sent an eagle, which laid her eggs in the maiden's
bosom, and from these eggs grew earth and sky, sun and moon, star and
cloud. Then was Wainamoinen born on the waters, and reached a barren
land, and gazed on the new heavens and the new earth. There he sowed the
grain that is the bread of man, chanting the hymn used at seed-time,
calling on the mother earth to make the green herb spring, and on Ukko to
send clouds and rain. So the corn sprang, and the golden cuckoo--which
in Finland plays the part of the popinjay in Scotch ballads, or of the
three golden birds in Greek folksongs--came with his congratulations. In
regard to the epithet 'golden,' it may be observed that gold and silver,
in the Finnish epic, are lavished on the commonest objects of daily life.
This is a universal note of primitive poetry, and is not a peculiar
Finnish idiom, as M. Leouzon le Duc supposes; nor, as Mr. Tozer seems to
think, in his account of Romaic ballads, a trace of Oriental influence
among the modern Greeks. It is common to all the ballads of Europe, as
M. Ampere has pointed out, and may be observed in the 'Chanson de
Roland,' and in Homer.
While the corn ripened, Wainamoinen rested from his labours, and took the
task of Orpheus. 'He sang,' says the 'Kalevala,' of the origin of
things, of the mysteries hidden from babes, that none may attain to in
this sad life, in the hours of these perishable days. The fame of the
Runoia's singing excited jealousy in the breast of one of the men around
him, of whose origin the 'Kalevala' gives no account. This man,
Joukahainen, provoked him to a trial of song, boasting, like Empedocles,
or like one of the old Celtic bards, that he had been all things. 'When
the earth was made I was there; when space was unrolled I launched the
sun on his way.' Then was Wainamoinen wroth, and by the force of his
enchantment he rooted Joukahainen to the ground, and suffered him not to
go free without promising him the hand of his sister Aino. The mother
was delighted; but the girl wept that she must now cover her long locks,
her curls, her glory, and be the wife of 'the old imperturbable
Wainamoinen.' It is in vain that her mother offers her dainty food and
rich dresses; she flees from home, and wanders till she meets three
maidens bathing, and joins them, and is drowned, singing a sad song: 'Ah,
never may my sister come to bathe in the sea-water, for the drops of the
sea are the drops of my blood.' This wild idea occurs in the Romaic
ballad, [Greek], where a drop of blood on the lips of the drowned girl
tinges all the waters of the world. To return to the fate of Aino. A
swift hare runs (as in the Zulu legend of the Origin of Death) with the
tale of sorrow to the maiden's mother, and from the mother's tears flow
rivers of water, and therein are isles with golden hills where golden
birds make melody. As for the old, the imperturbable Runoia, he loses
his claim to the latter title, he is filled with sorrow, and searches
through all the elements for his lost bride. At length he catches a fish
which is unknown to him, who, like Atlas, 'knew the depths of all the
seas.' The strange fish slips from his hands, a 'tress of hair, of
drowned maiden's hair,' floats for a moment on the foam, and too late he
recognises that 'there was never salmon yet that shone so fair, above the
nets at sea.' His lost bride has been within his reach, and now is
doubly lost to him. Suddenly the waves are cloven asunder, and the
mother of Nature and of Wainamoinen appears, to comfort her son, like
Thetis from the deep. She bids him go and seek, in the land of Pohjola,
a bride alien to his race. After many a wild adventure, Wainamoinen
reaches Pohjola and is kindly entreated by Loutri, the mother of the
maiden of the land. But he grows homesick, and complains, almost in
Dante's words, of the bitter bread of exile. Loutri will only grant him
her daughter's hand on condition that he gives her a sampo. A sampo is a
mysterious engine that grinds meal, salt, and money. In fact, it is the
mill in the well-known fairy tale, 'Why the Sea is Salt.' {169}
Wainamoinen cannot fashion this mill himself, he must seek aid at home
from Ilmarinen, the smith who forged 'the iron vault of hollow heaven.'
As the hero returns to Kalevala, he meets the Lady of the Rainbow, seated
on the arch of the sky, weaving the golden thread. She promises to be
his, if he will accomplish certain tasks, and in the course of those he
wounds himself with an axe. The wound can only be healed by one who
knows the mystic words that hold the secret of the birth of iron. The
legend of this evil birth, how iron grew from the milk of a maiden, and
was forged by the primeval smith, Ilmarinen, to be the bane of warlike
men, is communicated by Wainamoinen to an old magician. The wizard then
solemnly curses the iron, _as a living thing_, and invokes the aid of the
supreme God Ukko, thus bringing together in one prayer the extremes of
early religion. Then the hero is healed, and gives thanks to the
Creator, 'in whose hands is the end of a matter.'
Returning to Kalevala, Wainamoinen sends Ilmarinen to Pohjola to make the
sampo, 'a mill for corn one day, for salt the next, for money the next.'
The fatal treasure is concealed by Loutri, and is obviously to play the
part of the fairy hoard in the 'Nibelungen Lied.'
With the eleventh canto a new hero, Ahti, or Lemminkainen, and a new
cycle of adventures, is abruptly introduced. Lemminkainen is a
profligate wanderer, with as many loves as Hercules. The fact that he is
regarded as a form of the sea-god makes it strange that his most noted
achievement, the seduction of the whole female population of his island,
should correspond with a like feat of Krishna's. 'Sixteen thousand and
one hundred,' says the Vishnu Purana, 'was the number of the maidens; and
into so many forms did the son of Madhu multiply himself, so that every
one of the damsels thought that he had wedded her in her single person.'
Krishna is the sun, of course, and the maidens are the dew-drops; {170}
it is to be hoped that Lemminkainen's connection with sea-water may save
him from the solar hypothesis. His first regular marriage is unhappy,
and he is slain in trying to capture a bride from the people of Pohjola.
The black waters of the river of forgetfulness sweep him away, and his
comb, which he left with his mother, bursts out bleeding--a frequent
incident in Russian and other fairy tales. In many household tales, the
hero, before setting out on a journey, erects a stick which will fall
down when he is in distress, or death. The natives of Australia use this
form of divination in actual practice, tying round the stick some of the
hair of the person whose fate is to be ascertained. Then, like Demeter
seeking Persephone, the mother questions all the beings of the world, and
their answers show a wonderful poetic sympathy with the silent life of
Nature. 'The moon said, I have sorrows enough of my own, without
thinking of thy child. My lot is hard, my days are evil. I am born to
wander companionless in the night, to shine in the season of frost, to
watch through the endless winter, to fade when summer comes as king.' The
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기