844 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 18^7. 



The iianie still applied to the elf bolt by the ]!!^or\vegian peasantry is 

 "toideiikiler," or thuiulerstoiie, so that we can feel little hesitation in 

 assijiiiing- to the old Norse colonists of Orkney the difference still dis- 

 cernible in these expressions of the same popular idea. In the Fornal- 

 dar Sogur Nordlanda, or legends from the primitive period of the 

 north, derived from ancient manuscripts, Orvar Odd's saga furnishes 

 a curious evidence of this. The hero, who is already furnished with 

 three iron arrows, the gift of Ouse, a Finnish king possessed of magic 

 power, is hospitably entertained in the course of his wanderings by an 

 old man of singular a])pearance. 



Oil the side where the old )uaii sat he laid three stone arrows on the tabh' near the 

 dish. They were so large and handsome that Orvar thonght he had never seen any- 

 thing like them. He took them up and looked at them, saying: "These arrows are 

 Avell made." " If you really think them to be so," replied his host, "I shall make yon 

 a present of them." " I do not think," replied Orvar, smiling, "that I need cumber 

 myself with stone arrows." The old man answered: "Be not sure that you will 

 not some time stand in need of them; I know that you possess three arrows, the 

 gift of Guse, but, though you deem it unlikely, it may happen that Guse's weapons 

 will prove useless; then tliese stone arrows will avail you." Orvar Odd accordingly 

 accepted the gift, and chancing soon after to encounter a foe who by like magic was 

 impenetrable to all ordinary weapons, he transfixed him with the stone arrows, 

 which immediately vanished. 



The Danish collector, Olaf Worm, describes^ the chipped flint spear- 

 heads and daggers as being of doubtful origin, and that some persons 

 regard them as thunderbolts. 



Even in Japan flint and obsidian arrowpoints are regarded as the 

 weapons still in use by spirits. The popular belief is that every year 

 an army of spirits fly through the air with rain and storm; when the 

 sky clears the people go out and hunt in the sand for the stone arrow- 

 heads the spirits have dropped. Dr. Jannsen states that the Japanese 

 keep ancient stone implements in their chapels, treating them with 

 religious veneration. According to Dr. Schwaner, ancient stone 

 hatchets are still more carefully preserved by the present inhabitants 

 of Borneo in bags woven of cane and suspended in the recesses of 

 their dwellings among their talismans and amulets.'^ 



This variation in the jfopular mode of giving expression to the idea 

 of a supernatural origin for these primitive weapons is worthy of note 

 from the deflnite evidence it att'ords of a period when stone weapons 

 were as much relics of a remote past and objects of popular wonder 

 as now. 



The collection of amulets made by Professor Belucci of Italy, shown 

 in the Paris Exposition in 1880, contained the following, which had 

 been worn or kept as a protection against fire and lightning: Polished- 

 stone hatchets, jadeite lo, serpentine 12, aphanite 2, lydite, quartzite, 

 and argillite, 1 each — 32; arrowpoints or spearheads, flint 30, pyrites 

 4, calcite 1 — 41 ; total, 73. 



The superstitious belief in these objects is not confined to any par- 



' Museum Wormianura, A. D. 1655, pp. 39, 85. 

 ^Stevens, Flint Chips, pp. 87,88. 



