Custom and Myth

lost.  'Siati,' said she, 'how camest thou hither?'  'I am come to seek
the song-god, and to wed his daughter.'  'My father,' said the maiden,
'is more a god than a man; eat nothing he hands you, never sit on a high
seat, lest death follow.'  So they were united in marriage.  But the god,
like AEetes, was wroth, and began to set Siati upon perilous tasks:
'Build me a house, and let it be finished this very day, else death and
the oven await thee.' {99a}

Siati wept, but the god's daughter had the house built by the evening.
The other adventures were to fight a fierce dog, and to find a ring lost
at sea.  Just as the Scotch giant's daughter cut off her fingers to help
her lover, so the Samoan god's daughter bade Siati cut her body into
pieces and cast her into the sea.  There she became a fish, and recovered
the ring.  They set off to the god's house, but met him pursuing them,
with the help of his other daughter.  'Puapae and Siati threw down the
comb, and it became a bush of thorns in the way to intercept the god and
Puanli,' the other daughter.  Next they threw down a bottle of earth
which became a mountain; 'and then followed their bottle of water, and
that became a sea, and drowned the god and Puanli.' {99b}

This old Samoan song contains nearly the closest savage parallel to the
various household tales which find their heroic and artistic shape in the
Jason saga.  Still more surprising in its resemblances is the Malagasy
version of the narrative.  In the Malagasy story, the conclusion is
almost identical with the winding up of the Scotch fairy tale.  The girl
hides in a tree; her face, seen reflected in a well, is mistaken by women
for their own faces, and the recognition follows in due course. {99c}

Like most Red Indian versions of popular tales, the Algonquin form of the
Jason saga is strongly marked with the peculiarities of the race.  The
story is recognisable, and that is all.

The opening, as usual, differs from other openings.  Two children are
deserted in the wilderness, and grow up to manhood.  One of them loses an
arrow in the water; the elder brother, Panigwun, wades after it.  A
magical canoe flies past: an old magician, who is alone in the canoe,
seizes Panigwun and carries him off.  The canoe fleets along, like the
barques of the Phaeacians, at the will of the magician, and reaches the
isle where, like the Samoan god of song, he dwells with his two
daughters.  'Here, my daughter,' said he, 'is a young man for your
husband.'  But the daughter knew that the proposed husband was but
another victim of the old man's magic arts.  By the daughter's advice,
Panigwun escaped in the magic barque, consoled his brother, and returned
to the island.  Next day the magician, Mishosha, set the young man to
hard tasks and perilous adventures.  He was to gather gulls' eggs; but
the gulls attacked him in dense crowds.  By an incantation he subdued the
birds, and made them carry him home to the island.  Next day he was sent
to gather pebbles, that he might be attacked and eaten by the king of the
fishes.  Once more the young man, like the Finnish Ilmarinen in Pohjola,
subdued the mighty fish, and went back triumphant.  The third adventure,
as in 'Nicht Nought Nothing,' was to climb a tree of extraordinary height
in search of a bird's nest.  Here, again, the youth succeeded, and
finally conspired with the daughters to slay the old magician.  Lastly
the boy turned the magician into a sycamore tree, and won his daughter.
The other daughter was given to the brother who had no share in the
perils. {101}  Here we miss the incident of the flight; and the
magician's daughter, though in love with the hero, does not aid him to
perform the feats.  Perhaps an Algonquin brave would scorn the assistance
of a girl.  In the 'Kalevala,' the old hero, Wainamoinen, and his friend
Ilmarinen, set off to the mysterious and hostile land of Pohjola to win a
bride.  The maiden of Pohjola loses her heart to Ilmarinen, and, by her
aid, he bridles the wolf and bear, ploughs a field of adders with a
plough of gold, and conquers the gigantic pike that swims in the Styx of
Finnish mythology.  After this point the story is interrupted by a long
sequel of popular bridal songs, and, in the wandering course of the
rather aimless epic, the flight and its incidents have been forgotten, or
are neglected.  These incidents recur, however, in the thread of somewhat
different plots.  We have seen that they are found in Japan, among the
Eskimo, among the Bushmen, the Samoyeds, and the Zulus, as well as in
Hungarian, Magyar, Celtic, and other European household tales.

The conclusion appears to be that the central part of the Jason myth is
incapable of being explained, either as a nature-myth, or as a myth
founded on a disease of language.  So many languages could not take the
same malady in the same way; nor can we imagine any series of natural
phenomena that would inevitably suggest this tale to so many diverse
races.

We must suppose, therefore, either that all wits jumped and invented the
same romantic series of situations by accident, or that all men spread
from one centre, where the story was known, or that the story, once
invented, has drifted all round the world.  If the last theory be
approved of, the tale will be like the Indian Ocean shell found lately in
the Polish bone-cave, {102a} or like the Egyptian beads discovered in the
soil of Dahomey.  The story will have been carried hither and thither, in
the remotest times, to the remotest shores, by traders, by slaves, by
captives in war, or by women torn from their own tribe and forcibly
settled as wives among alien peoples.

Stories of this kind are everywhere the natural property of mothers and
grandmothers.  When we remember how widely diffused is the law of
exogamy, which forbids marriage between a man and woman of the same
stock, we are impressed by the number of alien elements which must have
been introduced with alien wives.  Where husband and wife, as often
happened, spoke different languages, the woman would inevitably bring the
hearthside tales of her childhood among a people of strange speech.  By
all these agencies, working through dateless time, we may account for the
diffusion, if we cannot explain the origin, of tales like the central
arrangement of incidents in the career of Jason. {102b}