In this picture, which is here annexed, there are several notable features. Not only has this Aino of 1804 the short, thick-set figure, heavy beard, and "bull-necked" appearance of the traditional dwarf, but he is represented as driving a reindeer. Now, this seems at once to connect the Aino with the Samoyed and the Lapp. For, although the reindeer is hunted by the Eskimos of North America, these people have never domesticated it. Moreover, the Aino is standing on runners, which appear to be very similar to the "skies" of the Lapps. Both of these details are distinctive of the Aino and the Lapp (for although the "skies" are used to the south of Finmark, they are peculiarly associated with the Lapps, who excel all other Norwegians in this accomplishment). "The deer-hide moccasins which they wear for winter hunting"[305] form another link of custom uniting the Aino to the Lapp and the Eskimo. So also does the harpoon and line which the Ainos use, or used, in seal-hunting, as is evidenced by two of Professor Chamberlain's tales.[306] Thus, although the Aino differs very much, in some respects, from the Eskimo type of man, he cannot be regarded as wholly different from him.[307] As regards stature, the two are much alike; and several usages have just been cited that distinctly unite the two. If one might discriminate, it might be said that the relationship extends westward from the Kurile Islands, rather than eastward into North America. That the Aino should remind travellers so strongly of certain European types, is very suggestive of a line of ancestry which is shared by Europeans. Indeed, those hirsute qualities which distinguish the Aino exist, though in much more modified forms (even in the instance of Russian peasants) among the people of Europe; sufficiently to mark off the average European from the races of other continents. That one line of European ancestry should lead back to a race strongly resembling the modern Ainos is therefore a belief that the outward appearance of the modern European rather tends to strengthen.
In speculating upon the appearance of the European "cave-man" of the past, a writer in the "Cornhill"[308] (? Mr. Grant Allen) states as his opinion that "at any rate, he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling and sensational a picture." Again, after remarking that those cave-men "seem to have been in most essential particulars almost as advanced as the modern Eskimo, with whom Professor Dawkins conjecturally identifies them," Mr. Grant Allen goes on to say[309]—"But if Professor Dawkins means us to understand that the cave-men were physically developed to the same extent as the Eskimo, it is necessary to accept his conclusion with great caution. It does not follow because the Eskimo are the nearest modern parallels of the cave-men, that the cave-men therefore resembled them closely in appearance. Several of the sketches of cave-men, cut by themselves on horn and bone, certainly show (it seems to me) that they were covered with hair over the whole body: and the hunter in the antler from the Duruthy cave has a long pointed beard and high crest of hair on the poll utterly unlike the Eskimo type." And although Mr. Allen admits, on a later page, that "it is possible enough that the cave-man was the direct ancestor of the Eskimo," yet he qualifies this admission by observing that "it does not at all follow that in physical appearance the earlier cave-men were the equals of the Eskimo, or, indeed, that the Eskimo are any more nearly related to them than ourselves."[310]
Of course, it is understood by the writer of these lines that the remarks upon "cave-men" just quoted, were made in the belief that all those cave-men lived at a period immensely removed from the present time. But the classification of man's history into so many "periods" and "ages" is admittedly vague. And the recognition of a visible relationship between certain races of living men, and those others who are called "pre-historic," is practically a recognition of the possibility that the not very remote ancestors of such races may be remembered with comparative clearness in the popular memory of those who are mainly descended from races of a higher type.
That this is really the case is what all the evidence adduced in these pages tends to show. And, indeed, the actual picture of a living Aino of about ninety years ago, reproduced above, is by no means remarkably different from the traditional figure given below, which represents the magician, or "good fairy," as he appears in the popular memory, when arriving from the far North, on Yule Eve, laden with gifts for his vassals. The annexed woodcut gives the idea of "Santa Claus," as he figures in the American fancy, and that, as the title given to him indicates, is really the German idea. The German idea, then, of this good magician is that he is a thick-set, bearded, little man, whose heavy furs denote that his home lies in the North, and whose reindeer team, harnessed to the sledge in which he has travelled, indicates that, like the Lapp and the Aino, he not only lives in a country where reindeer abound, but he has learned to tame them and make them serve his purposes. In this traditional figure one seems to see the type of a race that was even more like the Aino than the Lapp, or the Eskimo, although closely connected in various ways with all of these. Neither this figure, nor those of Barbarossa's dwarfs, need be regarded as absolutely correct; but in both we see that the popular memory is wonderfully faithful to what appears to be the actual truth.
A "GOOD FAIRY" OF TRADITION.
The existence in Europe of such a race, neither Lapp nor Aino, though akin to both, seems indicated by as recent a geographer as Olaus Magnus. In his map of Northern Europe,[311] the extreme north of Norway is neither "Lappia" nor "Finmarchia" (although both of these are shown), but a country which borders them on the north, and which he calls "Scricfinnia." This name appears to have been otherwise spelt "Scritfinnia" or "Scridfinnia," and one writer states that its people, the "Scridfinni," "derived their name from the word skrida, which in the Danish and Swedish languages means to slide."[312] This refers to the snow-skates, or "skies," which they are described as using, but as Olaus Magnus pictures the people of "Lappia" as also using "skies," it does not seem that that usage was distinctive of the "Scridfinni." But what appears to be of much more importance than this etymological point is the fact that the gloss which Olaus Magnus places opposite "Scricfinnia" is to this effect:—"Hic habitant Pÿgmei Vulgo Screlinger dicti." The earliest cited mention of the Screlinger, or Skrælings, occurs in the accounts of the Norse visits to North America, at the end of the tenth century; and the people thus referred to are generally identified with the Esquimaux. "The Northmen were used to call the Esquimaux Skrælings, a term of contempt, meaning, says Crantz, 'chips, parings, i.e., dwarfs.'" And the North American Skrælings of the tenth century, who are described as paddling about in skin-canoes, "skimming the surface of the water in their swift flight," are quite obviously either of the same race as the modern Eskimos, or else closely allied to them.[313] In the course of eight or nine centuries, the "Skrælings" may have become modified to some extent; and, indeed, modern travellers[314] are wonderfully unanimous in remarking upon the effect that nineteenth-century intermixture has had upon Asiatic and Greenland Eskimos, and upon the Ainos. But whatever the exact appearance of the tenth-century "Skræling," the map of Olaus Magnus denotes that, five or six centuries later, the extreme north of Norway was inhabited by a race of "Skrælings"; and that these people were the same as the "pygmies" of classical writers. It has already been pointed out[315] that the Greenland "Skrælings" were also spoken of as "goblins," and this again shows that that American type, whether most akin to the modern Eskimo or to the Aino, was not a new type to those European explorers,—whose legendary history was already teeming with stories of encounters with "goblins."[316]
Whatever may have been the ethnical position of the tenth-century "Skræling" of America, this sixteenth-century map of North Europe certainly signifies that the "pigmies," "Screlings," or "Scric-Finns" of the extreme north of Scandinavia were neither "Finns" nor "Lapps," but a race that ultimately yielded place to these. There are similar indications in the extreme north of Asia. The Chukches of Siberia undoubtedly connect the Lapp in the west with the Eskimo in the east. But these Chukches have traditions of a race called Onkilon, i.e., "sea-folk," whom the Chukches, moving northward, displaced or annihilated. "Tradition relates that upwards of two hundred years ago these Onkilon occupied the whole of the Chukch coast, from Cape Chelagskoj to Behring's Straits; and indeed we still find along the whole of this stretch remains of their earth-huts, which must have been very unlike the present dwellings of the Chukches; they have the form of small mounds, are half sunk in the ground and closed above with whale ribs, which are covered with a thick layer of earth." Baron Nordenskiöld, who is here quoting Wrangel's "Reise" (1825), gives himself a representation of one of those Onkilon earth-dwellings, seen by him at Cape North.[317] In these now-extinct "Onkilon," then, we have a race of people who, like the Finns and sea-trows of Shetland, were famed as "sea-folk," and who at the same time were underground-people or mound-dwellers.