THE INDIAN FAIRY BOOK 567 



are following is the daughter of a magician, who has plenty of everything, but 

 be values his daughter but little less than wampum. He wore a cap of wampum, 

 which was attached to his scalp; but powerful Indians, warriors of a distant 

 chief, came and told him that their chief's daughter was on the brink of the 

 grave, and she herself requested his scalp of wampum to effect a cure. . . . 

 The warrior's coming for it was only a cheat, and they now are constantly 

 making sport of it, dancing it about from village to village; and on every 

 insult it receives, the old man groans from pain. . . . The Red Swan has 

 enticed many a young man, as she has done you, in order to get them to procure 

 it, and whoever is the fortunate one that succeeds will receive the Red Swan 

 as his reward. 



This is the key-note of the tale. The youth by magic assumes 

 various forms — a humming-bird, a bit of floating down, a hawk — se- 

 cures the scalp and restores it to the old magician who immediately 

 becomes a young man and ultimately bestows upon his benefactor a 

 maiden of wondrous beauty, the erstwhile Eed Swan. 



This tale has in it many points of resemblance to a Mabinogi. In 

 the old "Welsh story of Kilhwch and Olwen, for example, there is the 

 same overcoming of difficulties by means of magic, the same transfor- 

 mation of men into animals and objects of nature, the same gaining of 

 some object of vital importance, and the ultimate bestowal of the 

 prize — a maiden of radiant beauty — upon the successful one. There 

 is much circumlocution and repetition in all of these primitive tales. 

 The difference seems mainly in the setting — the environmental in- 

 fluence, one may call it — not in the substance of the tales themselves. 



In the Dakota legend of Strong Desires and the Eed Sorcerer we 

 have the story of a youth (it is always youth that figures so heroically 

 in these tales, both Celtic and American) taunted for his timidity, who 

 becomes master of himself by accomplishing the death of an evil spirit 

 in human guise, and who gains his end through the same magical 

 influences that are woven so closely with all the events that take place 

 in this strange world of the past. So in other of these aboriginal 

 American folk tales — The Vanishing Little Men (the origin of the 

 fairy people), The "White Feather, The Magic Bundle, The Enchanted 

 Moccasins, The White Stone Canoe, The Summer Maker, to quote but 

 a few in passing, one is impressed with their close similarity to the 

 Celtic cultus. In many of the "Welsh tales and in such old Irish stories 

 as the Fate of the Children of Lir and The Fate of the Children of 

 Turrenn, there is the same changing of men and women into beasts and 

 birds that one finds so often in the tales of American aborigines. Many 

 of these tales, in fact, belong to that class of curious beast stories that 

 are so widely spread in the culture of all primitive folk. There is 

 hardly a story in which an animal of some kind, with human attributes, 

 does not appear. Men pass into animals or animals take on the speech 

 and ways of men as a matter of course in this land of enchantment. In 

 both the Celtic and American stories, too, there are men of heroic fig- 

 ure. Manabozho, the Hiawatha of the Iroquois, while given, as related 



