Language and Folklore. 209 
There was published in 1874 by C. Lytzen (in “Fra alle Lande”, 
vol .19) quite a small collection of such myths of origin from South 
: Greenland showing the origin of the hooded seal, the narwhale, the 
swordfish (delphinus orca) and the loon (colymbus septentrionalis) 
as well as of the Goddess of the Sea, the mistress of its animal life. 
This collection occupies a special place in Greenland’s folklore science 
on account of being the first in which a deliberate attempt is made 
to select and group a series of kindred myths. 
After a long stop folkloristic contributions were gathered once 
more in West Greenland by the end of the century and in the years 
next following, and among these contributions the animal tales have 
always found a place though neither particularly numerous nor long. 
Most of them have come to us from the Smith Sound Eskimo through 
the collections of A. L. Kroeber (1899) and Knud Rasmussen (1905). 
In G. Holm’s important collection of folklore from East Greenland 
(published in Danish 1888, in English 1914) there is only one real 
animal-tale, The Long-tailed Duck and the White Grouse, see First 
Part (no. 37); we find also the widely spread myth of the Woman 
and the Dog in a somewhat divergent version (1. с. no. 20) and the 
strange and noticeable myth of transmigration Navagijak (1. с. no. 22). 
In my small collection 1901 of Folklore from “North Greenland” 
G. e. the northern inspectorate of Danish Greenland particularly around 
the fiords Diskobay and Oommannag) there is a short tale (no. 2, 
Phon. Study p. 274) of the humblebee, and another (no. 6) of four 
birds in human shape (a raven, a gull, a hawk and a ‘qeeoqe’); 
further some epic-lyric animal-poems that had not been published 
before: “The ptarmigan up yonder on the little plain, on the new- 
fallen snow” (p. 289); “The lamentation of the widow of the salmon- 
trout when men had killed her mate” (p. 291), “The big wheat-ear 
comes quickly out from her nest” (p. 293); “Whom can I get for my 
husband” (p. 311—312) — the latter identical with the “Raven and 
Snowsparrow” just named from Smith Sound, only that the wheat- 
ear here has replaced the snowsparrow, — finally the poem of the 
Raven that carries a human thigh in its bill, when flying past (p. 312). 
The last mentioned poem is also known from Smith Sound (Kroeber). 
— Later (1905) I recorded again a few bird-poems when I stayed in 
Egedesminde en route for Ammassalik. The following summer R. 
Trebitsch travelled in the same parts of West Greenland and set down 
in his book about the trip (1910) some myths and poems including 
some old bird-poems (“The ptarmigan on the little plain, on the new- 
fallen snow”, р. 30; “The stone chat”, р. 86; "Two maids married to 
a gull and a whale’, p. 52, etc.).? 
Of the animal-tales published here now for the first time from 
Ammassalik some, as might be expected, have been previously recorded 
and finally an eagle for her husband; no. 103 a girl is transformed into a water- 
beetle; no. 126 the merganser. — Cf. also Franz Boas, Eskimo Tales and Songs 
(Journal of Amer. Folklore vols. VII, 1894, and X (1897) and Folk-lore of the 
Eskimo (ibid. vol. XVII, 1904). 
1 An animal tale of a similar kind from the Faroe Islands, consequently from a 
people that probably had no connection with the Greenlanders, is rendered by 
Lucas Debes (“Description of the Faroe Islands” ed. 1903, p. 132). It tells of 
the “Raven and the Puffin (Seaparrot).” The raven came to rob the puffin of 
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