26 
MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. l6. 
having killed them at his pleasure, he will stand eating them,’ 
said Haxige. ‘What sort of person are you that you despise 
Haxige ?’ he said, and, crushing her head many times with an 
axe, he killed her.” 
(In the second version the old woman is given far less space.) 
Both versions of the tale practically end with the old woman's 
narration. None of the things she speaks of take place. Why, 
then, does the old woman appear and speak of these things ? 
The best answ r er seems to be that they originally formed incidents 
of the tale, as it was told among the Omaha, and that their simple 
enumeration is a secondary feature that developed in conse- 
quence of the prominence of the type of plot development used. 
However, the prominence of this type of plot development is 
not due to any general preference on the part of the raconteur 
but apparently to his artistic belief that in such a way certain 
episodes in his plot could best be motivated. 
Summing up, we can say that a certain amount of the 
variability found in versions of the same myth or tale is due to 
the influence of different types of plot elaboration, which in 
turn is due to the artistic individuality of the raconteur. 
DRAMATIS PERSONS. 
The nature of the actors in myths has, we know, played a 
considerable part in discussions. The German school sought to 
interpret them all as impersonations of the forces of nature. 
We will not go into an analysis of their point of view, but instead 
approach the problem in another way. To what extent, let us 
inquire, is the specific character of the actor essential to the plot ? 
Would it make any difference, for instance, if we substituted 
one character for another ? In other words, what we will try 
to examine is whether the nature of the actor and his acts flow 
from the myth-content or not. Let us look at a few examples. 
No one would, for instance, hesitate to identify the Haxige 
myth given above with the Holy One, merely because the Omaha 
have the duck and the buzzard where the Winnebago have the old 
woman (muskrat) and the hawk. It seems, rather, reasonable 
to suppose that the exact animal nature of these intermediaries is 
