The setting and the framework of the narrative or story may be taken from a myth and one or more myth episodes incorporated in it, but the result is a fabrication because it does not rest on facts of human experience.
Now, for example, the narratives concerning the so-called Stone Coats, Stone Giants, or the Genonsgwa are not myths but legends. These beings do not figure in the Creation Myth of the Iroquois, but are a brood of beings whose connection with Stone is due to false etymology of a proper name in a myth.[26] This is an interesting and instructive example of forgotten derivations of words and names and the resultant new conceptions.
In the Genesis myth of the Iroquoian peoples the Winter Season, by personification, was placed in the class of man-beings with the name, “He-who-is-clad-in-ice,” or “He-who-is-ice-clad.” Now it so happens that the word for ice and for chert or flint stone is derived from a common stem whose fundamental meaning is “glare,” “crystal,” or “what is ice-like.” But the myth-tellers, in order to add an air of the mystical to their recital, did not fail to play on the double meaning of the word for ice, and so represented the Winter Man-being as “The Flint-clad Man-being” rather than as “The Ice-clad Man-being.” And the results of Winter’s cold and frost were told in terms of flint or chert stone, and so bergs and cakes and blocks of ice became in the narration objects of flint and chert stone. Winter’s cold is conveyed from place to place by means of cakes and bergs of ice, which are transformed by the poet into canoes of flint or stone. And in time the stone canoe is transferred from myth to the realm of fiction and legend to glorify the fame of some human hero.
And in the thinking of the Iroquois the Flint-clad Man-being became separated and distinct from the Man-being of the Winter. [[64]]At this point the fictitious Man-being who was Stone-clad parted company forever with the personified nature force or process that was frost-bearing and ice-clad. The former was gradually reduced to a peculiar species of mankind—the stone giant, for he was represented as stone-clad, while the latter retained his first estate as one of the chief characters in the Genesis myth of the Iroquoian peoples.
The ordinary Iroquoian concept of the Stone Coat or Stone Giant indicates, to the student at least, that the Winter God, the Great Frost Giant of the common Iroquoian Genesis myth, was its source. Aside from the evident etymologic connection, the most significant feature is the constant tradition that the home land of these anthropoid monsters is in the regions of the north where this same authority usually places the burial place of the Winter God after his defeat and death at the hands of his twin brother, the Life God, sometimes called the Master of Life.
The tales which relate how the Stone Coat people are made from perverse men and women first by carefully covering the body with pitch and then by rolling and wallowing in sand and down sand banks repeatedly, shows how utterly forgotten is the true source of this interesting concept among the story tellers and their hearers. There is no doubt that the original “Stone Coat” was the “Ice-Clad Winter God.” In the Curtin collection there are eight stories which refer to the Genonsgwa, or Stone Coats, sometimes called Stone Giants, but there is nothing in them to connect these peculiar fictitious monsters with the original conception. In none are the operations of the winter process predicated of these fictitious beings. They are merely exaggerated human figures and not symbols of a process of nature, their deeds are the deeds of men, and are not the acts of a process of nature expressed in terms of human activity.
And thus is founded the race of the Stone Giants or Stone Coats, or more popularly the Giants. When once these fictitious beings were regarded as human monsters they soon became confused with cruel hermits and bloodthirsty sorcerers who because of evil tastes were cannibals and dwelt apart from the habitations of men, who shunned and feared them, and the tales about them became narratives that do not detail the activities of the Winter God—the personified process of nature; and so, like their human prototypes, they increased and multiplied mightily, and so were as numerous as the leaves on the trees.
The persons or figures produced by the attribution of human life and mind to all objective and subjective things were, by virtue of the reality of the elements they embodied, the deities or the gods of this system of thought. In brief, they were composed of both the metamorphosed and of the unchanged first or ancient people who in distinctive character were conceived of as the formal and outward expression [[65]]of human mind. In the course of time these deities or gods are said to have taught their people the arts and crafts and the elements of their culture and their faith, thus revealing their will and the things which were to be in the future. This divine knowledge, this wisdom of the gods, was obtained or revealed in dreams or visions and by theophanies. But a knowledge of the activities of the people holding these views makes it evident that the doctrines and the arts and the crafts taught by the gods and the institutions founded by them for the people are in fact the activities of the people themselves which had been unconsciously imputed to these deities. Of course, the gods can teach and can reveal only what has been before imputed to them by the people.
The original and chief person in the myth was not a human being, although he was represented as possessed of the form, the desires, and the volition of a person. He is reputed to have performed acts which no human being had the power to perform, acts which only the functioning of a process of nature or of life could accomplish.
In some of these narratives human beings, bearing human names, have been substituted and the heroes and heroines of these stories are men, women, and children.