The Eskimos are great story-tellers, and the bulk of their fables, handed down by oral tradition from generation to generation, has assumed a stereotyped form. Their narration demands the exercise of an art in which the arctic folk excel—the art of vivid narration. Many of these tales begin as recitatives; some are almost wholly related in verse or musical form; others are told in prose, with every sort of appropriate gesture, modulation of the voice, and facial expression. A number of them are onomatopoeic in character, imitating the calls and cries of the birds and creatures of the wild. Story-telling is one of the principal features of the social life of these people of the north, and bulks largely in the programme of all festivities.
Many of the Eskimo legends would require a certain [[186]]amount of bowdlerising before they could be presented to the world as a book of Eskimo tales, a contribution to the folk lore of the nations; but some of them (notably the well dramatised story of the migration of the Saglingmiut, with its very essence of primitive arctic life) could be retold intact. Ethnologists have made a fairly representative collection of these stories in the course of the past fifty years, and most of them are to be found in the bibliography of arctic travel. Those incidental to these pages, with the exception, of course, of the Sedna tradition, are fresh contributions to the subject, not included, to the best of the writer’s belief, in any other work.
An amusing tale, related to the writer, is that of the amorous youth who made a particularly disappointing mistake.
In a certain village there lived a lovely maiden with her father. She possessed little but a happy disposition and a ready smile. The old man himself was so poor that his one dream of the future turned on the hope of his daughter securing a first-class hunter for a husband, who would provide for the two of them ever after. No young man, attracted by the girl’s bright eyes, was made welcome over the lamp in that igloo unless her father satisfied himself as to his credentials. But, as luck will have it apparently all the world over, the daughter’s love was won by the most ineligible suitor of them all—a youth poor in everything but in courage and hope and promise. The old man rejected all his overtures and rudely denied [[187]]him his daughter. So the two were driven to form plans of their own.
They decided to run away together, and that she should merely feign resistance when her lover arrived to carry her off. The night came for the attempt. The old man and the girl retired to rest as usual, rolled up in their blankets on the sleeping bench, and the lamp burnt low. Now, the approach to their abode was across a neck of ice spanning a deep ravine. The youth came along, and cautiously crept over the narrow bridge. Quickly entering the igloo, and perceiving the two sleeping forms, he snatched up one of them, furs and all, and rushed back whence he had come. To evade all possibility of pursuit, he smashed down the ice bridge behind him. Then, burning to look upon the face of his bride, he drew the blankets from about her head—only to discover with the utmost consternation that he had carried off the father instead of the girl! Dropping his burden none too gently, he made off at top speed and fled into the night. The story-teller failed to draw upon his imagination as to what happened in the domestic circle thus disastrously broken up, after that.
To return, however, to the chief of the legends—the legend of Sedna:
There was, once upon a time, a beautiful Eskimo girl, called Sedna. She was her widowed father’s only daughter, and they abode together by the sea shore. As she grew up she was wooed by many a [[188]]youth of her own tribe, and of others who came from afar. But to no single one of her lovers did her heart incline in the least. She refused altogether to marry. She had a proud spirit and delighted in disdain. At last, however, a day came when a very handsome young hunter appeared upon the scene, from a far-off strange country. Neither Sedna nor Anguta, her father, had ever heard of him before. He had beautiful skins cunningly wrought with a stripe in the coat, and a spear of ivory. His kyak drove inshore over the shining sea; but instead of landing on the beach, he poised it on the edge of the surf and called to the maiden in her tent above the strand to come off to him. He wooed her with an enticing song: “Come to me; come into the land of the birds, where there is never hunger, where my tent is made of the most beautiful skins. You shall rest on soft bearskins.… Your lamp shall always be filled with oil, your pot with meat.”
Sedna, framed in the entrance of the leathern hangings, refused. She would not come down. Wholly won at first sight, maidenlike she must refuse! So he began to plead and woo. He drew for her a picture of the home where he would take her, the rich furs that he would give, and the necklaces of ivory. Even though she vowed she wanted no husband, let her come down with her bag, her sealskin sack of treasures, and fly with him! Sedna made the coy boast, “Am I not the only one who does not want a husband?” but even as she said it, her hand fell from [[189]]the tent flap and she stepped down towards the sea. “Let my bag be brought.…”
He placed her aboard his kyak and paddled off on his return journey. So Sedna went away with her lover and her father saw her no more on the cliff by the seashore that was her home.
Came swift awakening and a bride’s tears! Sedna’s lover was no man at all, but a phantom man whose real self was a Bird! One of those peerless creatures of the arctic sky who, with “wide wing … broad-spread to glide upon the free blue road” above the crashing floes, wheels over the bitter waters of the North. Some have it a Fulmar, and some a Loon. It was a Spirit bird, having power to transform itself into the semblance of a human thing. Falling in love with the maiden, it had taken the form of the hunter and decoyed her to its own.