Folk Lore. HOW IT AROSE, AND WHAT IT MEANS. PART I. WITH tew exceptions, all the races that have peopled Europe from the dawn of history until now are branches of one great primary race, in which are also included the Hindus proper, and the ancient Medes, Persians, and inhabitants of Asia Minor. Comparative philology, one of the youngest of the sciences, has established this fact beyond dispute. The exceptions are the Basques, Magyars, Turks, Fins, Laps, and some Ugrian and Tartar tribes of Russia. All the rest, Hindus, Celts, Greeks, Latins, Letts, Slavs, Germans, and Scandinavians, are swarms thrown off from the parent hive, which was seated somewhere in the highlands of Central Asia north of the Hindu Coosh, towards Bactria and the Upper Oxus. The identical origin of all these subraces is attested by attributes and tokens of various kinds, physical, lingual, intellectual, moral, and religious, which are common to them all, and by which they are clearly distinguished from the Semitic and the black races adjacent to them on the south, from the yellow race which they have left in possession of the east, and from the Ugro-Fins, whom they have driven northward. But that which has, above all, afforded conclusive proof of the unity of the Aryan or Indo-European race, is the unity which modern research has discovered in the whole body of its several languages. Verbal roots, and even derivative words, signifying ideas which would need expression in the earliest stages of human society, are not only common to Sanscrit, Zend, and Celtic, the three most ancient Aryan tongues, but are also found under endless modifications in many or all of the Indo-European languages, ancient and modern. The word father is in German vater, Old German fatar, Norsk fadir, Slavonic bat, Greek and Latin pater, Celtic athair, Persian pader, Sanscrit patar, petri. It is derived from the root pa, which in Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin means to feed, and which in the Germanic tongues becomes fa, in conformity with a known law of orthographic change. From this root come also the Greek pao, Latin pasco, and the English words feed, fat. The father is the feeder of the family; he provides fodder for the cattle, and leads them to pasture. The office assigned in primitive Aryan households to the daughter-German tochter, Lithuanian dukter, Slavonic dotcher, Greek thugater, Gaelic dear-is indicated by her Sanscrit appellation duhitri, duhitar, the primary meaning of which is "milker." Sunu in the same language-Gothic sunus, English son-is from the root su, to beget; from which also are derived Savitar and sun, the former being one of the Sanscrit names of the life-giving sun-god, and sow, swine, Old German suin, Latin sus, Greek hys,-a primitive initial s being often replaced in the latter language by the aspirate. These names originally denoted the prolific nature of the animal. The Sanscrit name of the or (German ochs) is ukshan, the beast of burden or draught, from the root vah, which appears again in the Latin vehere, Greek ochein, to carry, and the English wagon, wain. Manu, the Sanscrit name of the first man, means the thinker, from the root man; whence the Greek men, Latin mens, English mind, and the Latin me-min-i, re-min-iscor, to remember, or, as the Scotch say, to mind. The Sanscrit word vâmani (corresponding to manu) is in Celtic femen, Latin femina, English woman. A single word of the otherwise wholly extinct Phrygian language has been preserved to us in a story told by Herodotus, and that word is one which might almost be taken for a specimen of some local dialect of English. The story is that Psammetichus, king of Egypt, wanted to know what was the primitive language of mankind; and believing that, whatever it was, a child would speak it instinctively if he were wholly precluded from learning any other, the king made the following experi He delivered two new-born infants to a shepherd, with orders to let them be suckled by a goat, to speak not a word in their hearing, but to take note of the first word uttered by them. After two years the shepherd visited them, and they approached him, stretching out their hands and uttering the word békos. It was found that this vocable existed in Phrygian, and meant "bread." So the king considered the problem solved; the inference being that Phrygian was the original language, and the Phrygians the oldest people. James IV. of Scotland repeated the experiment of Psammetichus; and the Scotch babies, shut up with a dumb man, talked Hebrew spontaneously! The learned Becanus was of opinion that Low Dutch was spoken in Paradise; but every Welshman knew better; and the transcendent antiquity of the Russian language had also its assertors. The solid result of thousands of years of such idle speculations-the one fruitful grain to mountains and deserts of chaff is that word békos, a comparison of which with the Sanscrit pak, and its English equivalent bake, tells us that the countrymen of Hector were men allied to us in blood. The preceding instances are a few out of multitudes that verify the common origin of the Indo-European race. Nor is language the only field from which proofs of the same fact can be freely gathered; they also exist abundantly in myths, traditions, and usages that are indigenous from the Ganges to the Shannon. The folk-lore of the modern European nations, and the pre-Christian ideas, rites, and customs of which it is the perishing remains; whatever is known of Druidism; the Pagan mythology of Scandinavia and Germany; that of Hellas, of Latium, and Etruria; that of Hindustan; Persian Sabianism, and the polytheism with which it was mingled in Central and Northern Europe, as well as in Greece and Italy; all these are collateral offshoots of the physico-religious conceptions which had become fast rooted in the minds of the aboriginal Aryans before their children began to go forth in quest of new homes. What then was the nature of these primitive conceptions? An answer to this question, perfectly authentic and not wanting in detail, exists in the sacred Brahminical books called Vedas, which are full of the hymns sung by the Aryan invaders of India when first they descended from their highlands to settle in the rich plains of the Punjaub. Sanscrit, the language of the Vedas, is not the very tongue which was spoken by the common ancestors of the Hindus and the Europeans; but of all extant derivatives from that tongue it is the purest and the nearest to the original. We have seen how it serves as a key to the structure and mutual relations of all the rest; and in like manner do the Vedas, those oldest-written records of the race, afford precious aid in another range of inquiry, for they represent almost exactly the stock of ideas which was possessed by the Aryans before their dispersion, and which each of their migrating tribes carried away with it from home. A chief place in this inventory of primeval lore is devoted to the great natural phenomena which have the most immediate influence for good or ill on human life. The sun and moon, the sky, clouds, wind, rain, thunder and lightning, inspired the beholders with feelings and ideas which their unpractised minds were not yet capable of embodying in abstract forms, and which they could only express by comparisons with objects that lay nearer to them. The sun was a golden wheel or a glittering bird; the lightning was now a serpent, now a bright spear shot athwart the heavens ; the winds were howling dogs; the changeful clouds were rocks and hills, or shaggy goatskins dripping with water; or they were milch kine, or divine women, the milk from whose bounteous breasts was the rain that refreshed the earth. These things and many others of like kind were no mere metaphors, as they seem at this day; they were believed in as downright realities. The world was then in its childhood; and minds of childlike freshness, eager to observe and surmise, but in which the discriminating faculty was still weak and undeveloped, easily accepted every suggestion of their own imaginations, and never doubted its exact correspondence with the very truth of things. Gods, beneficent spirits, and demons were seen at work, singly or in multitudes, in all the operations of nature. The Maruts, or spirits of the storm, milk the heavenly cows, who are tended by the Angirases; and the Bhrigus, genii of the lightning, are companions of both the former orders. The fine-handed Ribhus or Arbhus (whence the Old German Alb, English elf) are masters of all ingenious arts. He whom they protect is a strong runner, a singer wellstocked with lays, a formidable archer; he has wealth in abundance, and is rich in kindred. The Pitris (i. e. fathers) are the souls of the blessed dead. They dwell far above the clouds, in a lustrous realm whence the stars receive their light; and they too are elementary agents of great potency. They have adorned the heavens with stars, and apportioned darkness to the night, and light to the day. They themselves also shine as stars to the eyes of mortals. It appears from some of the Vedic myths, and from their European counterparts, that a considerable time elapsed during which the Aryans had not yet compassed that first postulate of civilisation,—the art of kindling fire at will. On the other hand, there is one myth, which, after passing through many curious and surprising modifications, has survived in some of them to this day, to tell the latest Aryans how profound was the impression made on the minds of their savage progenitors by the marvellous invention which produced the first great radical change in human life. Myths belonging to the first of these two classes indicate a period during which, although the use of fire was known, the enjoyment of that heavenly gift was still precarious. If the fire went out, there was no ready means of rekindling it; and that great misfortune could only be remedied by the spontaneous combustion, perhaps long delayed, of a forest, a parched heath or prairie, or a volcano. There is reason to believe that the terrible punishment incurred by vestal virgins who neglected to keep the sacred flame alive owed its origin to times in which the extinction of the fire on the domestic hearth was a most grievous calamity. The casual descent of fire from its heavenly abodes is variously typified in myths of the class we are now considering. There are some which represent the "winged" lightning under the figure of a sparrowhawk, falcon, or other bird, which carried the heavenly fire down to earth in its beak. The Celts ascribed this office to the wren. Brave as a lion, that smallest of birds alone had the courage to fetch a spark from the fount of celestial fire, even at the cost of having all its feathers burnt off. The loss was made up to the gallant little messenger by the other birds, each of which contributed something from its own plumage. This exploit of the wren is celebrated in sundry legends of Normandy and Bretagne, and the bird is still held sacred in the less-frequented districts of the Pays de Caux. Its common French name, poulette au bon Dieu, is an expression of the same traditional feeling; and an English proverb declares that "Robin Redbreast and Jenny Wren The robin was under the immediate protection of Thor, by virtue of the colour which is dear to the thundering god; and it was a fixed belief among all tribes of Celts that the killing of a wren was sure to be punished by lightning. A kindred belief, probably derived from the intermixture of Celtic with Saxon blood, prevails in some parts of England, as for example in Hertfordshire, where the crime of killing a wren or robbing its nest is regarded with horror, and is held to entail upon the offender some grievous injury by fire, to be suffered in person or property within the year. In Ireland it is still the custom to hunt the wren on St. Stephen's day, and carry his body about from door to door, the bearers shouting at each, "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds, St. Stephen's day was caught in the furze," &c. The custom had once a mystic meaning in relation with the great festive season of the first twelve nights of the sun's return from the winter sol stice. The sacrificial killing of the sacred bird on such an occasion was justified by religion. A similar custom prevails in the Celtic districts of France. The stork is one of the fire-fetching birds. His red legs are a mark of his calling, and in Germany he is honoured more than any other member of that fraternity. Like the wren, he is a sacred bird, and his person and his nest are kept inviolate by the general good-will as much as by the dread of punishment by lightning. An incensed stork, whose brood had been roughly ejected, fetched a firebrand in its beak, threw it into the empty nest, and set the whole building on fire. If a cartwheel, symbolical of the sun, be laid on the roof for the sacred bird, the dwelling will be safe from injury by any tempest, and no conflagration can destroy a house upon which storks are brooding. They even carry water in their bills, and let it fall upon the house as they soar above it in the air. After being long dependent upon casualties for the supply of fire, the primitive Aryans came gradually to consider the question, What became of the lightning when it had fallen and was seen no more? It was reasonable to suppose that it had buried itself somewhere; and when once this thought had taken possession of the mind, it would naturally lead to the surmise that possibly the hidden fire might by some means or other be drawn forth from its place of concealment. These ideas are also embodied among the Vedic myths relating to the origin of fire. Agni, the god of fire (in Latin ignis), has shut himself up in a cavern; he is brought out thence and delivered to Manu, the first man, by Mâtiraçvan, an obscure mythical personage, whose name signifies etymologically, "one who becomes unfolded in the womb." Stripped of its allegorical dress, this story means simply that an art has been discovered by which fire can be extracted from substances in which it lies invisible. The process by which this was first effected consisted in rubbing two pieces of dry wood together for a long time, and it is still in use among many savage tribes; but it is tedious, laborious, and always liable to failure. The inventive genius which was destined to become so eminent a characteristic of the Aryan race soon devised an easier and more expeditious way of performing the same operation. An instrument was constructed for the purpose, consisting of a horizontal disk of wood and an upright cylinder of the same material, which fitted loosely in a hole bored in the centre of the disk, so as to be capable of revolving freely on its own axis. The cylindrical shaft was set in rapid motion from right to left, and from left to right alternately, by means of a lanyard, one turn of which was passed round its upper part, whilst the two ends were held by the operator, and the work was continued until fire was produced. Such was the ingenious mechanism the invention of which marks the first grand epoch in the history of Indo-European civilisation. The magnitude of the change it wrought is hardly to be estimated by any standard which modern experience can supply. The impulse it gave to VOL. VI. ૨ ૨ |