54 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [bth. ann. 3i 



Hut we havo no tnle in which it is clear who all the characters are; the 

 niodifyiuj; inllueuces were too great and loug-continued to permit that. Though 

 iM.vlh-tales are, perhaps, more interesting ... in their present form, they 

 will have not their full interest for science till it is shown who most o£ the 

 actors are under their disguises. 



This is the nearest task of mythology. 



There are masterpieces in literature )iUc<l with myths, iu.spired with niyfh 

 conceptions of many kinds, .simply colored by the life of the time and tlie 

 nations among which these masterpieces were written and moulded lo shape 

 by artist.s. made strong from the spirit of great, simple people, us unknown to 

 us as the nameless heroes who perished before Agamemnon. How much 

 mythology is there in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the JEneid, in the Divine 

 Comedy of Dante, in the works of the other three great Italian poets? How 

 much in Paradise Lost? How could "King Lear" and "Midsummer Night's 

 Dream," or the " Idylls of the King," have been written without Keltic mytliol- 

 ogy? Many of these literary masterpieces have not merely myths in their com- 

 position as a sentence has words, but the earlier ones are enlarged or modified 

 myth-tales of those periods, while the later ones are largely modeled on and 

 inspired by the earlier.* 



Again he declares: 



It .should be remembered that whatever be the names of the myth-tale heroes 

 at present, the original heroes were not human. They were not men and 

 women, though in most cases the present heroes or heroines bear the names 

 of men and women, or children; tliey perform deeds which no man could per- 

 form, which only one of the forces of Nature could perform, if it had the 

 volition and desires of a person. This is the great cause of wonderful deeds in 

 myth-tales.' 



With reference to the work ab'eady done in American Indian 

 ni\'thology, Mr. Curtin remarics : 



We have now in North America a number of groups of tales obtained from 

 the Indians which, when considered together, illustrate and supplement one 

 another ; they constitute, in fact, a whole system. These tales we may describe as 

 forming collectively the creation myth of the New World. . . . In some cases, 

 simple and transparent, it is not difficult to recognize the heroes; they are 

 distinguishable at once either by their names or their actions or both. In other 

 cases these tales are more involved, and the heroes are not so easily known, 

 because they are concealed by names and epithets. Taken as a whole, however, 

 the Indian tales are remarkably clear.' 



As to the content of these American Indian tales anri legends. Mr. 

 Curtin says: 



What is the substance and sense of these Indian tales, of what do they treat? 

 To begin with, they give an account of how the present order of things arose in 

 the world, and are taken up with the e.vploits, adventures, and struggles of 

 various elements, animals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants, rocks, and other 

 objects before they became what they are. . . . According to the earliest 

 tales of North America, this world was occupied, prior to the appearance of 

 nian. by beings called variously " the first people," " the outside people," or 

 simply " people."^ — the same term in all cases being used for people that is 

 applied to Indians at present. 



' Curtin. .Tcreminh. Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars, 

 p. Ix. Bostou, 1890. 

 ^IMil., p. xvli. 

 " Curtin, Jeremiah. Hero-Tales of Ireland, pp- >x, x Boston, 1894. 



