There exists among the Baffin Islanders, as among all the other tribes, one long consecutive legend in particular, which should rank, if not with the great Scandinavian and Icelandic Sagas beloved of William Morris and of Wagner, at least with some of the most picturesque of Grimm’s immortal fairy tales, and certainly with any of the strange and monstrous legends of Kalevala, the Finnish cycle of national song.
Students of national story-telling will probably find analogies and relationships between the Eskimo story of “Sedna” and the characteristic folk tales of the other arctic or sub-arctic peoples east and west. “Sedna” is beguiled into marriage by a gallant hunter who is really not a man at all, but a sea bird. This sort of tragedy, or disillusionment, is common in Eskimo fable. In one Alaskan-Eskimo tale, the heroine marries the human semblance of a bear.
The Sedna legend—a religious legend around which turns a large volume of Eskimo superstition—has its repulsive as well as its poetic aspects. But to one who has lived intimately with these people, it would [185]seem that so strange and awesome a story of the wild north as the tragedy and death of Sedna should be set, in song, to the metre of Kalevala and Hiawatha. It is the metre of a child-like version of adventures happening to a child-like folk.
Belief in this legend, in the existence and the power of Sedna, a maleficent sea-goddess of the underworld, forms a large part of the Eskimo religion, and the annual autumnal festival arising out of it is the principal celebration in their calendar. In connection with this phantasy, it is noteworthy that the Eskimo conception of the spirit of evil—or at least of hostility to man—is unlike that of any other nation. The Eskimo devil is a woman.
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.
Sedna was inconsolable. She had the horror of a very human girl at her strange mate, and could by no means make his land her home and his people hers. The legend has it that the Loon provided for her as an ordinary hunter would have done; but she was wild and homesick, and passed her days bewailing, as lone and desolate an exiled maiden as ever cried, “Woe, woe!”
(Sedna’s disillusionment is a note in the story wholly coarse to European ideas. The Eskimos are a people without prudery. A perfectly natural incident on the journey revealed that the lover was a bird.)
But the father wearied for his daughter—the Eskimo [190]word has the loving possessive “his own daughter”—and at length fitted out his boat and sailed away to that distant coast whither she had been borne. The husband Bird was from home when he came to this land, and it was a sad and sorry tale that greeted his ears from the wind-lashed, spray-beaten maiden that had been his smiling, contented child. Without more ado, he lifted her into his boat, made one swift turn, and fell to retracing his course. The craft—a tiny mark—was soon lost to sight in the welter of the waves.
Then the Loon, returning, enquired and said, “But where is my wife?” The cry echoed round the naked cliffs. And answering cries, wind-borne on the darkening air, told him that his wife had fled. Her father had come and snatched her back, in grief and anger, to his bosom.
At once, the Bird, assuming the Phantom form again, followed in his kyak; but when the Father saw him coming he covered up his daughter with the furs and things he had loaded in the boat. Swiftly the kyaker bore down upon them, and rushing alongside demanded to see his wife.
“Let me see my wife!” he cried. “Let me only see her; pray let me see her!”
The angry father refused, and held determinedly on his way.
“Then let me see her hands only. I only ask to see her hands!” the Kokksaut cried, to be passionately rejected again. [191]
Then, bowing his head over the opening of his kyak in grief and desolation, the kyaker fell behind. He had failed! His manhood had failed; Sedna had hated and left as true a lover as ever a man could have been to her, and he would no more of it! With one wild sweep of his wings, he was a bird again, the kyak a mote upon the waters beneath, and a stroke or two of his great vans brought him above the boat of the fugitives. He hung there awhile, uttering the strange cry of the Loon; but at last dropped away into the darkness.
Then there arose a storm—a black arctic storm—out at sea.
And Sedna’s father was stricken with fear. Terror of the bird-man gripped his heart. Terror of the offended powers of sky and sea nerved him to a bitter sacrifice. The raging waves demanded Sedna, and he must give her up, and repulse her struggling, and see her drown. He bent forward, and with one fearful thrust, cast his daughter out of the boat—so to propitiate the offended sea!
The wild, white face rose to the surface, and despairing hands caught at the gunwale. But the Terror was not to be defrauded, and the father, frenzied with grief and the desperate determination of his deed, snatched up an axe—a heavy thing of ivory and wood—and brought it down upon those pathetic, clinging fingers. The maiden fell back into the sea (and the first joints of her maimed and bleeding hands turned into seals). But, coming up again, [192]with agony in her eyes she made another struggle to catch at the boat. Three times the drowning creature came back; but she was the doomed victim of the sea, and the father must consummate the sacrifice. Three times he smote and chopped at her mangled hands. (The second joints became the ojuk, the ground seals; the third joints made the walrus; and whales sprang of the rest.)
Apropos of this reeking legend, it must be borne in mind that the Eskimo believe implicitly in Spirits and in their power to demand sacrifice. The father, believing the storm to be an expression of the anger of the Sea god (on behalf apparently of the sea-bird) and a demand for the daughter he had reclaimed, did not hesitate to give her up and to steel himself against her drowning agony.
At last Sedna sank, to rise no more.
And the storm sank, too. The boat presently came to land. The father entered his tent and lay down beneath it and slept a sleep of exhaustion and overspent grief. In the tent was fastened Sedna’s dog. But that night there was a high tide which washed up the beach, demolished the tupik, and drowned the two living creatures within. So that man and dog rejoined the maiden in the depths of the sea. There they have dwelt ever since, in some “house” or cave of Eskimo imagination. There they preside over one whole region—called Adlivun—where souls are imprisoned for punishment for a while or all time, after death. [193]
The sea creatures who owe their origin to Sedna belong to her and she controls them. She protects them, and causes the storms which bring wreckage and famine to the kyakers and sealers. Hence she is in Eskimo mythology inimical to mankind, the source of the worst evils they know, a spirit who has to be propitiated or quelled by ceremony, as the case may be.
She is considered to be of enormous stature, with two plaits of hair, each thick as an arm, and she has only one eye. The other was pierced and put out in her drowning struggle.
The writer has seen an example of this sort of sacrifice in actual life, and it redeems the story of Sedna’s father from the senseless selfishness of which it seems to be compounded by some narrators. Two boats containing a party of hunters were returning from sealing, when a squall struck them. Before sail could be taken in, one boat overturned and the men were thrown into the water. They all climbed back except one, who was numbed with cold and dazed with shock. He did not sink immediately, being held up by his deerskins. He even drifted close by the boat, and easily within reach. One man, indeed, did reach out and touch him with an oar, but when he failed to grasp it the general decision was to let him drown. He was “material for the Tongak” spirits, claimed by the Spirit of the sea—as was Sedna in the legend. He simply drowned in the sight of the others, and of the women on shore, who covered their faces [194]with their hoods and gave the death wails, i.e., began to shriek and howl in the frenzied manner proper to the circumstances.
It is possible that no better story than that of Sedna (with all its elements of phantasy, human emotion, poetry and savagery) could be found in illustration of a good deal Dr. Marrett has to tell us in his “Psychology and Folk Lore,” by way of reducing primitive folk-lore and primitive procedure (religious or medical, or both, arising out of it) to a science of primitive psychology. His masterly analysis of the outlook of the wholly untutored mind on the phenomena of cause and effect demonstrates quite clearly the sincerity and the obviousness of the “savage” rites and customs which seem to us so barbaric, irrelevant and monstrous.
The Sedna myth gives rise to the taboo, and the practices of the Sedna ceremony. The aboriginal theory of things (the origin of the sea creatures, the cause of storms, etc.), leads to aboriginal methods of dealing with them “On (close) acquaintance, such as perhaps is to be obtained only on the field,” says Dr. Marrett, “the savage turns out to be anything but a fool, more especially in anything that relates at all directly to the daily struggle for existence … common sense is no monopoly of civilisation,” although the educated application of it to the material and spiritual needs of life may easily be so. The interest of the primitive theurgist is a practical one, and the elements in his problem are only two, namely, [195]a supernormal power to be moved and a traditional rite that promises to move it. The special function of the conjuror or the medicine man among aboriginal peoples is to grapple with the abnormal, and “this ever tends to constitute for the savage a distinct dispensation, a world of its own.” There is in such a story as the Sedna legend some groundwork of common sense and verifiable experience; and in the practices which arise out of it, this has to be taken into account, together with some very real occult content (whether of suggestion or hypnotism, the most modern of sciences alone could say), and some conscious fraud no doubt on the part of the conjurors.
Prior, however, to an account of this ceremony, it will be as well perhaps to devote some space to the conjurors themselves. For, among the Eskimo, as among other primitive peoples, the typical “medicine man” is a specialist, trained for his vocation and initiated into an exclusive guild. He is by no means necessarily a fraud and a charlatan. Normally, the primitive faith healer has as much faith in himself and his methods as his patients have, and between the two of them—when it is a question of a mental reaction to be obtained—there is no reason why absolute success should not crown his efforts. In the sphere of material results these amazing methods seem to be wholly empirical, and yet it cannot be denied that the Eskimo conjurors sometimes produce effects comparable only to some of the well-known demonstrations of the “magic” of the East. [196]