If space permitted I could adduce several other remarkable coincidences between the folk-lore of Greenland and that of Europe, and especially of Scandinavia. It appears, then, that the intercourse between the old Scandinavians and the natives must have been greater than has generally been believed.[169]
[CHAPTER XIV]
THE INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY
All this superstition of which I have been speaking of course seems to us mere meaningless confusion, the extirpation of which must be an unmixed advantage. But if we place ourselves at their point of view, is it so much more meaningless for them than our Christian dogmas, which lead them into a world entirely foreign to them? In order to understand these dogmas, they had first to transpose them into their own key of thought, or, in other words, they had to make them more or less heathen before they could really grasp them at all. It is useless to imagine that a people can suddenly, at a word of command, begin to think in an entirely new manner. This transmutation has cost them much labour, and though they are still heathen at bottom and believe in their old legends, yet the new doctrine has introduced confusion into their ideas. This alone might tempt one to think that it would have been better to have let them preserve their own faith undisturbed. It gave them, with their comparatively meagre capacity for ideas, the easiest explanation of their surroundings; it peopled nature with the supernatural powers which they needed for consolation when reality became too hard and complex for them. And how characteristic these myths are of the Eskimos—for example, the conception of the region beyond the grave! Here there is neither silver nor gold, neither gorgeous raiment nor shining palaces, as in our stories; earthly riches have no value for the Eskimo. Nor are there lovely women, flowery gardens, and so forth. No; at most there is a mud hut, a little larger than his own, and in it sit the happy spirits eating rotten seals’ heads, which lie in inexhaustible heaps under the benches; and around it there are splendid hunting-grounds, with quantities of game and much sunshine. In his eyes our Paradise of white-robed angels, where the blessed sit around upon chairs, seems a tedious and colourless existence which he does not understand, and which excites no longing in him. We can scarcely wonder at an angekok, who said to Niels Egede that he far preferred the tornarssuk’s or ‘Devil’s house,’ where he had often been; ‘For in heaven there is no food to be had, but in hell there are seals and fishes in plenty.’
One would expect that the missionaries’ victory[170] over heathendom would be a very easy one among so peaceful and good-humoured a people as the Greenlanders; but this can scarcely be said to have been the case. The natives had many objections to allege against the Christian assertions. For example, they could not understand that the sin which Adam and Eve committed ‘could be so great and involve such melancholy consequences’ as that the whole human race should be condemned on account of it. ‘Since God knew all things, why did he permit the first man and woman to sin?’ The idea of free-will seems to them, frankly speaking, mere rubbish, and, but for free-will, Adam’s offspring would never have been corrupted, and the Son of God need not have suffered.
One girl was not at all contented with the answer she received to these objections. ‘She wanted to have them so answered that she could inwardly assent and feel that the answer was true, and that she could silence those who had so much to say against this part of our doctrine.’ Similarly, they were of opinion that Adam and Eve must have been very foolish to think of chattering with a serpent, and ‘that they must have been very fond of fruit since they would rather die and suffer pain than forego a few big berries.’ Others thought that it was just like the kavdlunaks (Europeans); for ‘these greedy people never have enough; they have, and they want to have, more than they require.’ One angekok thought it was very unlucky that Christ, the great angekok, who could even bring the dead to life, was not born among the Eskimos; they would have loved him, and obeyed him, and not done like the foolish kavdlunaks. ‘What madmen! to kill the man who could bring the dead to life!’ When they saw that Christian Europeans quarrelled and fought, they had little faith in the Christian doctrines, and said: ‘Perhaps, if we knew as much as they, we, too, would become inhuman.’ And they thought that it was impossible to find well-behaved Europeans, ‘unless they had been several years in Greenland and had there learnt mores.’
Some asked, since Christianity was so essential, why God had not instructed them in it sooner, for then their forefathers, too, could have gone to heaven. When Paul Egede answered that perhaps God had seen that they would not accept the Word, but rather despise it, and thereby become more guilty, an old man said that he had known many excellent people, and had himself had a pious father; and even if some of them might have despised the Word, ‘still there were the women and children, who are all credulous.’ When Paul Egede explained to them that worldly goods are ‘trumpery,’ altogether unworthy to go to heaven, someone answered: ‘I did not know that these things were not worth thinking about; if it is so nice there, why are we so unwilling to leave the earth?’