56 W. THALBITZER and HJALMAR THUREN. 
speech, the traditional pitch of the recitatives is quite fixed. By the 
side of the true songs they form a definite, artistic mode of expres- 
sion, whose special mode of operation is partly of a rhythmic nature, 
partly consists in certain movements of the pitch of the words. I 
took many of these recitatives on my phonograph and Hj. Thuren 
has experimentally reproduced some examples of them (see Nos. 1, 
2, 3, 4, 5). But we have not had any certain means for the determ- 
ination of these tones, which are not tones, as they are mixed with 
the indeterminate noises of ordinary speech; the method of indicating 
them (notes with incomplete heads) is naturally imperfect. It would 
certainly be interesting especially to investigate the relation between 
the pitch in natural speech and in these elaborately developed 
half-songs. 
A peculiarly bewitching charm though primitive lies in the 
East Greenland mother’s lullaby tones (no. 12), which she hums the 
while she rocks her child to sleep. She bears the child in the skin- 
cowl sewn on to the back of her coat, between the shoulders, and as 
she sways her body from one side to the other she croons a simple 
song of two notes, one very long and one short which is higher — 
the most primitive song in the world, which may have remained 
unchanged from the earliest childhood of humanity. Generation after 
generation has been introduced with these tones, which have formed 
themselves in the soul of the Eskimo woman out of the loneliness 
and wild monotony of the desert land. 
Whether the melodies have remained unchanged on being handed 
down from generation to generation, we can at present only hazard 
a guess. So far as I am aware, no examples are as yet known of 
one and the same melody occurring among two Eskimo tribes, who 
live further away from one another than in two neighbouring fjords, 
as for example Umanagqfjord and Diskobugt in М. W. Greenland, 
Sermilik and Ammassalik in East Greenland. A few songs, the text 
of which is known over the whole of Greenland (see further part 
Ш), have presumably, however, had melodies which were known 
over wider areas." But this is not certain. On the other hand, it 
1 In my earlier collection of melodies from West Greenland ("Eskimo Music from 
North Greenland”) and the texts (‘“‘Old-fashioned Songs”, both in Meddelelser om 
Grenland XXXI, 1904) several examples of texts are cited, which are sung as 
variations at different places of the west coast, thus No. 1 from Umanagqfjord 
(70° 40 N.L.) (1. с. 289) corresponding to a variant No.105 from Aulatsiwikfjord 
(68° 13° N.L.) south of Egedesminde (1. с. 312), with melody to the first-named 
(l.c. 375); No. 2 from Umanag corresponding to No. 101 from Rodebay in Disko- 
