164 W. THALBITZER. 
ogalütua‘in “ап epic song” — all as distinct from the ara‘# and 
iwn'etin (cf. below), “mumernane”, without drum-dancing and with- 
out any refrain. 
The kaiak and berrypicking songs have sufficient similarities to 
be placed in a group by themselves, as to form by having regular 
aja-refrains like the drumsongs, and as to contents by having a 
functional destination as a kind of signal-songs, the former to sign- 
alize what spoil the kaiakman is bringing home from the sea, to his 
housemates waiting; the latter to signalize where in the mountains 
the berrypicker is moving in order to keep up the connection be- 
tween the comrades when they are spread out on the mountain sides 
and in the valleys. Both kinds of songs are of course suitable for 
whiling away the time for the solitary oarsman on the water or the 
wanderer in the mountains. They were often heard in the hut on 
the shore as alternative songs that from afar animated the hills or 
the sea with human life. 
The drumsongs consist of three principal groups: religious, thea- 
trical and juridical songs — functions that are closely eonnected with 
social conditions. The singing of these poems with long, elaborate 
refrains, without sense, and short lines inserted, with sense, is called 
the i”p’erneg and the song itself y'en (i”p’e tin in the plural; 
in'e ta: ‘his drumsong’ from i”p'erpon ‘sings a drumsong’). 
| The service of the pagan priests was sustained and elevated 
all through by singing and drumming. The angakok carries on his 
conversations with the spirits he calls forth in poems that are sung 
with long-winded refrains. He uses his voice with the art of a ventri- 
loquist, so that it seems to come now from his body as he sits in 
his hut before the entrance, now from the deep into which his soul 
has subsided, now from the other end of the long house-passage. It 
did not fall to my lot personally to attend at a seance of this sort, 
but from my winter visit at Sermilik where Ukuttiaq and other old 
men sang and drummed for us a whole night, and from other occa- 
sions at Ammassalik I have preserved an ineffaceable impression of 
the solemnity and sombre beauty of the religious songs. The natives 
themselves too declared that no song was so beautiful as the spirits’ 
song. 
The 10 poems that I have gathered here under the designation 
religious songs do not belong to quite the same species. The first six 
are the songs of assistant spirits. While the angakok is conjuring 
in the hut now one, now another of his spirits is heard singing this 
kind of song, containing descriptions of the travels of the spirit or 
