Language and Folklore. 387 
the “Troll-woman of the Great River Folk”, which, to my knowledge, 
is unknown in West Greenland, has reached Ammassalik from the 
northern part of the east coast (along the northern routes of migration ?). 
Коораад is the Eskimo name for “a great river”, west of Hudson Bay, 
and is used of several rivers in Canada and Alaska (Mackenzie River 
for instance), a fact of which naturally the natives of Greenland were 
ignorant. The meeting too, between Uidrteq “the circumnavigator of 
the land” and Kunuk is claimed to be in the north — which agrees 
with the probable actual facts of the case, for Uiarteq sailed (according 
to the legend) along the west coast of Greenland and north of the 
great island thus returning home to Ammassalik from the north. 1 
On the other hand — according to Mitsuarnianna — Aqåttiaq (Rink’s 
Agigssiag) and the Inalilik-legends belong to the inland toward the 
south. This tale about the inland-folk is well-known in West Green- 
land (of this Mitsuarnianya was of course ignorant), and must 
have travelled that way around Cape Farewell to the East coast. The 
same is doubtless true of the tale about Uleewaitsiag, which is pos- 
sibly the corrupted form of the name of a Norse chieftain from the 
southern West Greenland of the Middle Ages. The tale is an original 
South Greenlandic local myth which has reached up to Ammassalik. 
According to Mitsuarniayna this likewise holds true of the tales about 
Qasidtta, the hunting liar, and about Aarddittiag, the figure who re- 
presents the apotheosis of the drum-contest custom. In the Golden 
Age of the Greenland Eskimo, South Greenland was the place where 
flourished that national custom of which there are only slight traces 
outside of Greenland. These are, no doubt, local legends from the 
south. | 
Each hamlet had its great narrator, or perhaps several masters 
in the art, — old men or women, who, in the long winter evenings, 
if nothing more festive offered, and on the suggestion of one of their 
housemates, would begin to relate, and from his or her place between 
the skin hangings of the platform, and while silence fell over the 
listening group, hold them spellbound with one tale after another. 
These artists, these tellers of tales, did not fabricate but piously pre- 
served the traditions of their forefathers. They were the bearers and 
propagators of a literature which had never been expressed in the 
dead signs of letters but which breathed and lived in the fresh me- 
mory and warm hearts of the people. Through Holm’s description ? 
we first reached an understanding of the spiritual wealth possessed 
by these people in their customs and traditions; what it meant to 
them and what they lost when the great world on the south appeared 
to them and the waves of a foreign culture rolled in and wasted 
away the golden records of their past. | 
They knew how to recite in a curious epic-dramatic temper, with 
a power of mimicry revealing a mixture of calm and vivacity, a 
practical acquaintance with the effect of a variation in the tempo, of 
pauses and accentuation, of the rise and fall of the voice, of all the 
1 CE First Part, p. 331 (cf. 312). 
2 First Part pp. 125 and 229. 
DE 
