Algonquin Legends of New England | Page 8

and remained
once for three years among the more civilized. She has so correctly
described their habits that I am satisfied that her statements are
correct." [Footnote: The word Eskimo is Algonquin, meaning to eat raw
fish, Eskumoga in Micmac, and people who eat raw flesh, or Eskimook,
that is, eski, raw, and moo-uk, people. This word recalls in-noo-uk,
people, and spirits, in Eskimo, Innue, which has the same double
meaning. This was all suggested to me by an Indian.]
These Eskimo brought from the Old World that primeval gloomy
Shaman religion, or sorcery, such as is practiced yet by Laplanders and
Tartars, such as formed the basis of the old Accadian Babylonian cultus,
and such as is now in vogue among all our own red Indians. I believe
that it was from the Eskimo that this American Shamanism all came. In

Greenland this faith assumed its strangest form; it made for itself a new
mythology. The Indians, their neighbors, borrowed from this, but also
added new elements of an only semi-Arctic character. Thus there is a
series of steps, but every one different, from the Eskimo to the
Wabanaki, of Labrador, New Brunswick, and Maine, from the
Wabanaki to the Iroquois, and from the Iroquois to the more western
Indians. And while they all have incidents in common, the character of
each is radically different.
It may be specially noted that while there is hardly an important point
in the Edda which may not be found, as I have just shown, in Wabanaki
legends, there is very little else in the latter which is in common with
such Old World mythology as might have come to the Indians since the
discovery by Columbus. Excluding French Canadian fairy tales, what
we have left is chiefly Eskimo and Eddaic, and the proportion of the
latter is simply surprising. There are actually more incidents taken from
the Edda than there are from lower sources. I can only account for this
by the fact that, as the Indians tell me, all these tales were once poems,
handed down from generation to generation, and always sung. Once
they were religious. Now they are in a condition analogous to that of
the German Heldenbuch. They have been cast into a new form, but they
are not as yet quite degraded to the nursery tale.
It may be objected that if the Norsemen in Greenland were Christians it
is most unlikely that they would have taught the legends of the Edda to
the heathen; to which I reply that some scholar a few centuries hence
may declare it was a most improbable thing that Christian Roman
Catholic Indians should have taught me the tales of Glooskap and Lox.
But the truth is, we really know very little as to how soon wandering
Vikings went to America, or how many were here.
I would say in conclusion that, while these legends of the Wabanaki are
fragmentary and incomplete, they still read like the fragments of a book
whose subject was once broadly and coherently treated by a man of
genius. They are handled in the same bold and artistic manner as the
Norse. There is nothing like them in any other North American Indian
records. They are, especially those which are from the Passamaquoddy

and Penobscot, inspired with a genial cosmopolite humor. While
Glooskap is always a gentleman, Lox ranges from Punch to Satan;
passing through the stages of an Indian Mephistopheles and the Norse
Loki, who appears to have been his true progenitor. But neither is quite
like anything to be found among really savage races. When it is borne
in mind that the most ancient and mythic of these legends have been
taken down from the trembling memories of old squaws who never
understood their inner meaning, or from ordinary senaps who had not
thought of them since boyhood, it will be seen that the preservation of a
mass of prose poems, equal in bulk to the Kalevala or Heldenbuch, is
indeed almost miraculous.

THE ALGONQUIN LEGENDS OF NEW ENGLAND.
GLOOSKAP THE DIVINITY.

Of Glooskap's Birth, and of his Brother Malsum the Wolf.
Now the great lord Glooskap, who was worshiped in after-days by all
the Wabanaki, or children of light, was a twin with a brother. As he was
good, this brother, whose name was Malsumsis, or Wolf the younger,
was bad. Before they were born, the babes consulted to consider how
they had best enter the world. And Glooskap said, "I will be born as
others are." But the evil Malsumsis thought himself too great to be
brought forth in such a manner, and declared that he would burst
through his mother's side. [Footnote: The reader of Rabelais cannot fail
to recall here the remarks of the author as to the extraordinary manner