Algonquin Legends of New England | Page 5

to the clouds to oppose him, Glooskap's head touches the
stars, and scorning to slay so mean a foe like an equal, he kills him
contemptuously with a light tap of his bow. But in the family circle he
is the most benevolent of gentle heroes, and has his oft-repeated little
standard jokes. Yet he never, like the Manobozho-Hiawatha of the
Chippewas, becomes silly, cruel, or fantastic. He has his roaring revel

with a brother giant, even as Thor went fishing in fierce fun with the
frost god, but he is never low or feeble.
Around Glooskap, who is by far the grandest and most Aryan-like
character ever evolved from a savage mind, and who is more congenial
to a reader of Shakespeare and Rabelais than any deity ever imagined
out of Europe, there are found strange giants: some literal Jotuns of
stone and ice, sorcerers who become giants like Glooskap, at will; the
terrible Chenoo, a human being with an icy-stone heart, who has sunk
to a cannibal and ghoul; all the weird monsters and horrors of the
Eskimo mythology, witches and demons, inherited from the terribly
black sorcery which preceded Shamanism, and compared to which the
latter was like an advanced religion, and all the minor mythology of
dwarfs and fairies. The Indian m'teoulin, or magician, distinctly taught
that every created thing, animate or inanimate, had its indwelling spirit.
Whatever had an idea had a soul. Therefore the Wabanaki mythology is
strangely like that of the Rosicrucians. But it created spirits for the
terrible Arctic winters of the north, for the icebergs and frozen wastes,
for the Northern Lights and polar bears. It made, in short, a mythology
such as would be perfectly congenial to any one who has read and
understood the Edda, Beowulf, and the Kalevala, with the wildest and
oldest Norse sagas. But it is, as regards spirit and meaning, utterly and
entirely unlike anything else that is American. It is not like the Mexican
pantheon; it has not the same sounds, colors, or feelings; and though
many of its incidents or tales are the same as those of the Chippewas,
or other tribes, we still feel that there is an incredible difference in the
spirit. Its ways are not as their ways. This Wabanaki mythology, which
was that which gave a fairy, an elf, a naiad, or a hero to every rock and
river and ancient hill in New England, is just the one of all others
which is least known to the New Englanders. When the last Indian shall
be in his grave, those who come after us will ask in wonder why we
had no curiosity as to the romance of our country, and so much as to
that of every other land on earth.
Much is allowed to poets and painters, and no fault was found with Mr.
Longfellow for attributing to the Iroquois Hiawatha the choice exploits
of the Chippewa demi-devil Manobozho. It was "all Indian" to the

multitude, and one name answered as well in poetry as another, at a
time when there was very little attention paid to ethnology. So that a
good poem resulted, it was of little consequence that the plot was a
melange of very different characters, and characteristics. And when, in
connection with this, Mr. Longfellow spoke of the Chippewa tales as
forming an Indian Edda, the term was doubtless in a poetic and very
general sense permissible. But its want of literal truth seems to have
deeply impressed the not generally over particular or accurate
Schoolcraft, since his first remarks in the Introduction to the Hiawatha
Legends are as follows:--
"Where analogies are so general, there is a constant liability to mistakes.
Of these foreign analogies of myth-lore, the least tangible, it is believed,
is that which has been suggested with the Scandinavian mythology.
That mythology is of so marked and peculiar a character that it has not
been distinctly traced out of the great circle of tribes of the
Indo-Germanic family. Odin and his terrific pantheon of war gods and
social deities could only exist in the dreary latitudes of storms and fire
which produce a Hecla and a Maelstrom. These latitudes have
invariably produced nations whose influence has been felt in an
elevating power over the world. From such a source the Indian could
have derived none of him vague symbolisms and mental idiosyncrasies
which have left him as he is found to-day, without a government and
without a god."
This is all perfectly true of the myths of Hiawat'ha-Manobozho.
Nothing on earth could be more unlike the Norse legends than the
"Indian Edda" of the Chippewas and Ottawas. But it was not known to
this writer that there already existed in Northeastern America a
stupendous mythology, derived from a land of storms