The Angmagsalik Eskimo. 409 



lances preserved in the West Greenland section of the National Museum 

 at Copenhagen, which somehow appear to have escaped his attention 1 . 



A peculiar form of harpoon is used by sealers hunting in couples 

 on the ice. This weapon is called by Holm the Ituartit harpoon 2 , which 

 term was generally accepted until Cand. Thalbitzer in 1909 chose to 

 style it the "Ituartin" harpoon. Here obviously the linguist must be 

 right, and those unversed in the Greenland tongue had perforce to recog- 

 nise the new name. In 1914, however, with the publication of Mr. Thal- 

 bitzee's work, complications arose. We here find, on p. 422, among 

 "Technical names", the "ittuarteen, itcïarteen harpoon"; the Editor does 

 not, however, restrict himself to these technical terms, but uses also 

 "ituartit harpoon" (p. 409; p. 412), "ice sealing harpoon (ittuarteq)" 

 (p. 421 ; p. 433) and "ittuartin" (p. 420). Disregarding the phonetic spel- 

 ling, and overlooking the difference between one "t" and "tt" as im- 

 material, we have still four different terms remaining. That all four 

 are current and correct we do not venture to doubt, since the linguist 

 uses them indiscriminately, and we may rest assured that there is some 

 valid linguistic reason for the fact that only two of them are included 

 under the heading "technical names". The ordinary reader, however, 

 not being a linguist, comes to a standstill here, with the obvious query: 

 "What am I to call the thing?" I for my part have thought it safest 

 for the present to keep to the term originally given by Holm: "Ituartit". 



In his paper published in 1909, Mr. Thalbitzer haled forth from 

 the Stockholm Museum a couple of ordinary West Greenland tow-line 

 toggles, which he showed in illustration as points of ituartit harpoons 3 ; 

 in 1914, however, (p. 433) he makes reparation for the error in the fol- 

 lowing words: "The whole form of the weapons, however, makes this 



1 The young Danish ethnographer, Kai Birket Smith, has already, in a 

 lecture delivered to "Det Grønlandske Selskab" referred to this point as 

 "one of the inaccuracies which have crept into the description of Kommandør 

 Holm's collection recently published by the linquist Will. Thalbitzer". 

 Hr. Birket Smith's studies in South Greenland, and among the collec- 

 tions in the National Museum, had shown him that Mr. Thalbitzer was 

 but imperfectly acquainted with the Greenland harpoon. He was also 

 aware, moreover, that the East Greenland form was derived from the 

 original type, whereas that shown in fig. 4 is a variant which later made 

 its appearance on the West Coast. He did not, however, — as far as can be 

 judged from the text of the lecture as published in Det grønlandske Sel- 

 skabs Aarsskrift, 1912 — perceive that Mason's illustration of the East 

 Greenland harpoon agreed with the form of all other East Greenland 

 harpoons, and that it was only in his description that any inaccuracy 

 existed. Since the above was written a correction has been made in the 

 text of the lecture as published (Det Grønlandske Selskabs Aarsskrift, 1914, 

 p. 62). 



2 Medd. om Grønland, vol. 10, p. 78 and Thalb. II (i. e. Holm) p. 51. 



3 Thalb. I, p. 501. 



