Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 5 / Miscellaneous Later Essays

by F. Max Müller

“There was a girl at a party, and some one told his love for her by shaking her shoulders, after the manner of the country. She could not see who it was in the dark hut, so she smeared her hands with soot, and when he came back she blackened his cheek with her hand. When a light was brought she saw that it was her brother and fled. He ran after her, followed her, and as she came to the end of the earth, he sprang out into the sky. Then she became the sun, and he the moon, and this is why the moon is always chasing the sun through the heavens, and why the moon is sometimes dark as he turns his blackened cheek towards the earth.”[39]

We now turn to the South, and here, among the lowest of the low, among the Hottentots, who are despised even by their black neighbors, the Zulus, we find the following gem of a fable, beaming with mingled rays of religion and philosophy:—

“The Moon, it is said, sent once an insect to men, saying, ‘Go thou to men, and tell them, As I die, and dying live, so ye shall also die, and dying live.’ The insect started with the message, but whilst on his way was overtaken by the hare, who asked: ‘On what errand art thou bound?’ The insect answered, ‘I am sent by the Moon to men, to tell them that as she dies and dying lives, they also shall die and dying live.’ The hare said, ‘As thou art an awkward runner, let me go’ (to take the message). With these words he ran off, and when he reached men, he said, ‘I am sent by the Moon to tell you, As I die, and dying perish, in the same manner ye also shall die and come wholly to an end.’ Then the hare returned to the Moon, and told her what he had said to men. The Moon reproached him angrily, saying, ‘Darest thou tell the people a thing which I have not said?’ With these words she took up a piece of wood, and struck him on the nose. Since that day the hare's nose is slit.”

Of this story, too, there are various versions and in one of them the end is as follows:—

“The hare, having returned to the Moon, was questioned as to the message delivered, and the Moon, having heard the true state of the case, became so enraged with him that she took up a hatchet to split his head; falling short, however, of that, the hatchet fell upon the upper lip of the hare, and cut it severely. Hence it is that we see the ‘hare-lip.’ [pg 086] The hare, being duly incensed at having received such treatment, raised his claws, and scratched the Moon's face; and the dark parts which we now see on the surface of the Moon are the scars which she received on that occasion.”[40]

The Finns, Lapps, and Esthonians do not seem a very poetical race, yet there is poetry even in their smoky huts, poetry surrounded with all the splendor of an arctic night, and fragrant with the perfume of moss and wild flowers. Here is one of their legends:—

“Wanna Issi had two servants, Koit and Ämmarik, and he gave them a torch which Koit should light every morning, and Ämmarik should extinguish in the evening. In order to reward their faithful services, Wanna Issi told them they might be man and wife, but they asked Wanna Issi that he would allow them to remain forever bride and bridegroom. Wanna Issi assented, and henceforth Koit handed the torch every evening to Ämmarik, and Ämmarik took it and extinguished it. Only during four weeks in summer they remain together at midnight; [pg 087] Koit hands the dying torch to Ämmarik, but Ämmarik does not let it die, but lights it again with her breath. Then their hands are stretched out, and their lips meet, and the blush of the face of Ämmarik colors the midnight sky.”

This myth requires hardly any commentary; yet as long as it is impossible to explain the names, Wanna Issi, Koit, and Ämmarik, it might be said that the story was but a love story, invented by an idle Lapp, or Finn, or Esthonian. But what if Wanna Issi in Esthonian means the Old Father, and if Koit means the Dawn? Can we then doubt any longer that Ämmarik[41] must be the Gloaming and that their meeting in the summer reflects those summer evenings when, particularly in the North, the torch of the sun seems never to die, and when the Gloaming is seen kissing the Dawn?

I wish I could tell you some more of these stories which have been gathered from all parts of the world, and which, though they may be pronounced childish and tedious by some critics, seem to me to glitter with the brightest dew of nature's own poetry, and to contain those very touches that make us feel akin, not only with Homer or Shakespeare, but even with Lapps, and Finns, and Kaffirs.

I cannot resist, however, the temptation of inserting here a poetical rendering of the story of Koit and Ämmarik, sent to me from the New World, remarking [pg 088] only that instead of Lapland, Esthonia is really the country that may claim the original story.