208 W. THALBITZER. 
passes without the recording, as far as known, of this or any other 
species of poetry in Greenland. But the Eskimo poems and legends 
continued their unnoticed existence on the tongues of the natives, 
and the interest in folk-lore aroused about the middle of the 19th 
century saved a part thereof from oblivion. 
The fable of the Raven and the Geese — the former has married 
a goose and will now follow the departing geese over the sea; the 
geese endeavour to assist him for a time, but at last he drops exhausted 
into the sea and is drowned; drowning he calls for help in a kind of 
song — was first published by H. Rink who, however, gave but an 
incomplete and partly misunderstood extract of the Greenland version 
(in “Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn” II, 1871, no. 46, p. 88). He also 
gives a brief and rather distantly related variation from Alaska 
(Unalit-Eskimo of Norton sound)! and thereafter from Labrador 
(1. с. по. 126 p.136). The next time we find a record of this animal 
fable is from the most northerly West Greenland, by A. L. Kroeber 
(1899).” From the same place, i. e from Cape York and Smith Sound 
a later record of the fable was brought by Knud Rasmussen 1905, 
and the same author gave us the following year another copy from the 
most southerly Greenland, the Cape Farewell districts.” In Kroeber’s 
and Knud Rasmussen’s variations from Smith Sound this fable begins 
with the conversation between the Raven and the Snow-sparrow, the 
same that I recorded elsewhere at that period: first rejected by the 
snow-sparrow the raven tries his luck with the geese. The two poems 
(“The Raven and the Geese” and “The Raven and the Snow-sparrow’’) 
otherwise appear independently everywhere in Greenland. In my text 
from Ammassalik the song of the drowning raven is more complete 
than in any of the others, and I consider my recorded form nearer 
the original. 
No other animal fable than this was recorded by Rink who on 
the other hand has embodied a number of mixed tales of animals 
and men in his collections, such as the myth about the Woman and 
the Dog (1. с. I, по. 17) which is a myth of origin, explaining the 
origin of the human races. 
Nelson, The Eskimo about Bering Strait, pp. 462—464. 
Kroeber, Animal Tales of the Eskimo. Journ. Amer. Folklore, Vol. XII (1899). 
Knud Rasmussen (1905) р. 179—180; (1906) р. 138—140. 
Further examples of “mixed” fables from Rink’s first collection (1866) are the 
following numbers (in the English edition 1875 there are some of the same 
tales, but with other numbers): no. 16 of the man who married a fox; no. 17 
of the man who married a merganser (elements of both of these are also found 
in the records from Labrador, see Rink, 1. с. р. 358. The same applies to the 
following). No. 11 of the two maidens of whom one married an eagle, the other 
a whale. No. 142 of the reindeer, the hare and the fox in human shape; no. 147 
of the gull, the raven and the hawk in human shape. No. 48 is about the dog | 
that was adobted as son of the house and helped the inmates against the inland- 
people. No. 144 of a fight with two dangerous “amaroq’s” (wolf-monstres). — 
From Rink’s second collection (1871) I may refer to the following (besides no. 46 
above mentioned): no. 8 a woman gives birth to a bear’s cub; no. 28 an old 
bachelor marries a fox; no. 29 and 30 seals and a merganser appear as, human; 
no. 34 the children of woman and shark; no. 49 a man becomes a wolf’s cub 
(he sees gnats in human shape); no. 73 the wolf-monsters (ef. I, no. 144); no. 77 
the giant seal; no. 87 bees in human shape; no. 94 the hawk that could talk; 
no. 97 the cormorant in human shape; no. 101 a girl has a fly, a sand-hopper 
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