160 W. THALBITZER. 
POETICS 
As we found a wonderful technique in the Eastgreenland music 
especially as regards the rhythm of their melodies so we shall see 
that the technical treatment of the Eskimo tongue for poetical use 
bears testimony to a relatively high standing which as in the case 
of music is no doubt “the work of many centuries.’ It is a stone- 
age culture that has continued onwards along its own course, and 
has developed its own kind of poetics and prosody. 
The formative power evinced in the Eskimo poems is in its first 
source wedded to the entire morphological nature of this language, 
to the natural rhythmics of the words. It is significant that in the 
Eastgreenland tongue the same word expresses ‘to breathe and to 
make poetry, a poem is a breath (anerca), the poem is words infused 
with breath or soul. Nowhere this power has expanded and florished 
so much as in the Greenland drumsongs where the singing and the 
poem unite with the sounding and flowing rhythms of the drum 
and the solo dancing to an artistic unity of a strange and grotesque 
beauty. | 
A great many of the poems (the first group) are meant to be 
recited, not to be sung; the voice of the reciting is not free or ac- 
cidental, but bound to certain tonal movements fixed by custom and 
tradition, that produce a sort of word-melody. In the magic prayers 
this musical speech or accent is about the same for them all, whereas 
the petting songs and children’s verses have more variety in their 
rhythms and tones. — Examples of the musical character of the poems 
without any melody, but with only a fixed recitation movement have 
already been given in the preceeding section (pp. 62—64, nos. 1—11), 
and more remarks will follow below. 
All the other poems are songs with words intended to be sung 
in the normal manner, e. g songs while rowing the kaiaks or while 
wandering in the hills to pick berries, or the religious songs sung 
by the angakok in the hut when he calls his spirits. 
It is also a wellknown custom to sing songs without words, 
merely humming (soqulawon), e. g. if a man after his home-coming 
and meal seats himself on the platform and memorizes a song, with 
or without drum accompaniment. | 
The art of poetry (like that of the singing) was never purpose- 
less among the Eskimo, it had its aim and its place as a social 
function, or a vital function — no wonder it reached such а high 
development wherever the Eskimo community was thriving vigor- 
ously. 
1 Hjalmar Thuren: On the Eskimo Music (in this volume рр. 4-6, cf. р. 29). 
