[166] Myth of Kirkê, p. 80.
[167] Turner’s Samoa.
[168] Josephus, loc. cit. For this, and many other references, I am indebted to Schwartz’s Prähistorisch-anthropologische Studien. In most magic herbs the learned author recognises thunder and lightning—a theory no less plausible than Mr. Brown’s.
[169] Lib. xxviii.
[170] Schoolcraft, v.
[171] Mr. Brown (Academy, Jan. 3, 1885) says he freely acknowledges that his ‘suggestion might be quite incorrect’—which seems possible—and that ‘if Odysseus and Kirkê were sun and moon here is a good starting-point for the theory that the moly was stellar.’ This reminds one of the preacher who demonstrated the existence of the Trinity thus: ‘For is there not, my brethren, one sun, and one moon,—and one multitude of stars?’
‘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.