The moon gives her the like answer. Then she meets the sun; and the sun tells her:
“ ‘Well I know thy little loved one.
He it is who hath created
Me thro’ all the hours of daylight
In the sheen of gold to dazzle,
Me to glint in sheen of silver.
Well I know thy little loved one.
Yonder, woman, is thy darling,
Plunged in marshes to the girdle,
In the moor e’en to the armpit.’ ”
Thus directed, Marjatta found her son and brought him home. He grew up beautiful but nameless. His mother called him Floweret, but strangers dubbed him Idler. An old man named Virokannas came to baptize and bless him, but hesitated to do so ere he had been examined and proved. Then came Väinämöinen old and trusty, who sentenced the boy, as he had been taken from the marsh and was sprung from a berry, to be laid upon the ground of the berry-bearing meadow, or taken to the marsh, and his head crushed with a tree. But the son of the berry replies:
“ ‘O thou old man without insight,
Without insight, full of folly!
Thou hast given a foolish sentence;
Ill thou hast the laws expounded!’ ”
Väinämöinen himself had taken the child of his own mother and thrown it into the water to redeem his own life. The boy reminds him of this, and hints that he will have to pay the penalty of his deed. Virokannas then quickly baptizes the boy, and blesses him to become king of Karjala and guardian of all powers.
I have narrated this incident somewhat at length, to exhibit the obvious mixture of heathen and Christian elements which it contains. Marjatta, there can be little doubt, is the Virgin Mary; Ruotus has been identified with Herod; and the discomfiture and departure of Väinämöinen, which follow the cited passages, point very clearly to the expulsion of paganism as typified by the mighty figure of the great sorcerer. Lönnröt’s method in the compilation of the epic from fragmentary songs leaves much to be desired in the certainty of traditional origin of many of its verses, perhaps of entire episodes; and the one before us may not be free from suspicion. Yet it is hardly likely that the poet would have had recourse to the savage conceit of the berry, had he not found it already in the legend he has presented to us. It would be difficult to match it in the sagas of modern Europe. As we saw just now, the analogous conceit of the fish is found in the case of Archbishop Abbot in no bolder shape than a dream. So the Irish Life of Saint Molasius of Devenish, preserved to us in a manuscript, written, probably from dictation, in the sixteenth century—that is to say, not long before the English tale became current—presents the holy man’s mother as dreaming “that she got seven fragrant apples; and the last apple of them that she took into her hand her grasp could not contain it for its size; gold (as it seemed to her) was not lovelier than the apple.” Her husband interprets the dream of “an offspring, excellent and famous, with which the mouths of all Ireland shall be filled:” an interpretation of course justified by the saint’s birth.[111.1] We may conjecture that the legend in an earlier form related that impregnation took place by means of an apple; but before it was put into writing, perhaps long before, the incident had been modified by the slowly growing intelligence of the folk who related it.
To the aborigines of North America, however, this unusual mode of generation has always been within the limits of belief. Yehl, the famous hero of the North-west Coast, effected one of his numerous births by transforming himself into a spear of cedar or a blade of grass, or, as it is told in a variant, a drop of water, and being swallowed by his principal opponent’s daughter, or sister, as she was drinking. Most legendary heroines have been satisfied with one such miracle. This lady seems to have been specially unfortunate; and we do not wonder at the suspicions of her natural guardian, when we are expressly told that she was not allowed to eat or drink anything until the chief had examined it, as she had become pregnant from eating certain things many times before. One man cannot know all Yehl’s adventures, as the Thlinkit very truly assert; for all their accounts differ. The adventure we are now dealing with was undertaken for the purpose of rescuing the sun, moon and stars, which his antagonist, whose favourite grandson he thus became, had stored away in three mysterious chests. On a previous occasion he had assumed the unlikely form of a small pebble on the sea-shore. A woman whose sons had all been slain by her brother was pacing the beach and weeping for the dead, when a large fish—it is equally credible whether a dolphin or a whale—pitied her and spoke to her, telling her to swallow the pebble and drink some sea-water. She did so, and bore a child, Yehl, who avenged her on his uncle. After all his various achievements on behalf of mankind, Yehl became the totem of the Raven Clan of the Thlinkit.[112.1] When America was discovered, the Aztecs, though they had not emerged from the Stone Age, were, compared with the Thlinkit, a civilised people. Yet they continued to believe in the generation of their famous god Quetzalcoatl in a similar manner to that of Yehl. One account relates that he owed his birth to a precious green stone, identified by Captain Bourke with the turquoise, which his mother Chimalma found one day while sweeping, and swallowed.[113.1]
I shall have to recur to American traditions; but I must first mention other instances of pregnancy from eating or drinking. Heitsi-Eibib, the Hottentot ancestor-god, owed his birth to this cause. In one of the legends a young girl picks a kind of juicy grass, chews it and swallows the sap. Thence becoming pregnant, she gives birth to the hero. In another legend it is a cow that eats of a certain grass, and Heitsi-Eibib is consequently born as a bull-calf.[113.2] In the saga of Ardshi-Bordshi we are told that a childless queen procured from a hermit a handful of earth to be boiled in sesame oil in a porcelain vessel. On boiling it, behold! it was changed into barley porridge, which she ate, but neglected to eat the whole of it, as the hermit commanded. When she had eaten she found herself “in blessed circumstances,” and bore Vikramâditya, a Bodisat and a king of renown. Her maid, having finished what was left of the porridge, was also delivered of a boy, who became the Bodisat’s faithful companion.[113.3] Here, as M. Cosquin remarks, we are reminded of the märchen in the Pentameron, already cited. The material eaten bears us back to a story alleged to be part of the Siamese cosmology. After a gradual degeneration of the human race, we are assured, the sea will be dried up and the earth destroyed by fire. Converted into dust and ashes, it will be purified by a wind, which will carry off all remains of the conflagration. So sweet an odour will then exhale from the purified soil that it will draw from heaven a female angel, who will take of this sweet-smelling substance and eat. The pleasure will cost her dear; for she will no more be able to ascend to her native home, and by means of her strange food she will conceive and give birth to twelve sons and daughters, who will repopulate the world. For an inconceivably long period this new race will remain gross and ignorant, until in the fulness of time a god will be born to dissipate the darkness by teaching the true religion, the virtues that must be practised, the vices that must be shunned and all other sciences needful to be known, giving to the people scriptures where all these things are explained, and writing upon their hearts the holy law, so long effaced from the mind of man.[114.1]
The Shih King, one of the sacred books of the Chinese, contains an ode intended to be recited at a sacrifice in the ancestral temple of Shang. It refers to the origin of Shang’s father Hsieh. His mother was a concubine of Khû, a ruler who flourished in the twenty-fifth century before Christ. She was bathing, as these Chinese heroines frequently are on such occasions, when a heaven-commissioned swallow dropped an egg, which she took and gulped down, becoming in this way the mother of Hsieh.[115.1] The lady is not here, as in the case of other founders of Chinese dynasties, represented as a maiden. Yu’s mother, for instance, appears to be thus regarded. A pearl, a substance not more unpromising than a pebble, fell in her bosom, and she swallowed it. According to one version the boy was born from her breast.[115.2] A Mongolian tale traces the origin of the Chinese nation to a Khan’s daughter, who compelled a poor Bandé to disgorge a precious stone as big as a sheep’s eye, which he had stolen from two men, and swallowed. As soon as he brought it up, she seized and swallowed it in her turn. It rendered her pregnant. The Bandé, by reading a charm, turned her into a she-ass; and in this form she gave birth to twin boys, one good, the other evil. From them the Chinese nation is descended.[115.3] Several Tartar tribes ascribe their lineage to Alankava, the virgin daughter of Gioubiné, son of Bolduz, king of the Mongols. One night a great light awakened and embraced her, entering her mouth and passing through her body. As this peculiar proceeding was repeated every night, in order to dissipate suspicions of her virtue (for she had become pregnant) the chiefs of the national assembly were introduced into her chamber to witness the occurrence. When her time was come she gave birth to three boys, each of whom was the ancestor of a tribe, and from one of whom Genghis Khan and Tamerlane descended.[115.4] An Irish tradition more modestly (probably for reasons discussed on a previous page) presents the mother of Kieran, the first saint born on Hibernian soil, as only dreaming that a star fell into her mouth.[116.1]
The heroic traditions of Ireland—at least those of Ulster—do not stick at a dream. Both Conchobar and Cuchulainn were of supernatural birth. Cathba, the noble Druid, was thirsty one night; and Ness, his wife, finding nothing in the house, went down to the river Conchobar and drew from thence, filtering the water through her veil. When she brought it to her husband and a light was struck, lo! there were two worms in the water. Thereupon Cathba drew his sword and forced his wife, under threat of death, to drink what she had brought for him. She drank two mouthfuls, and swallowed at each mouthful one of the worms. She soon found she had conceived; and it was of those worms she had conceived, though later times discredited this, asserting that the king of Ulster was her lover and the father of her child Conchobar.[116.2] This mode of conception was a family failing, for Cuchulainn, Conchobar’s nephew, was born in the same way. His mother, Dechtire, Conchobar’s sister, returning from the funeral of a foster-son of whom she had been very fond, asked for a drink in a bronze cup. As she put the cup to her lips she felt a little creature enter her mouth with the drink. After drinking she lay down to sleep, and a man appeared to her in a dream, telling her, among other things, that he had been her foster-son, that now he had entered her womb and she was pregnant of him, and that he was to be called Setanta. This man was Lug, one of the ancient Celtic divinities, identified with the grandson of Balor, the mythical warrior of Tory Island.[117.1]