Chapter V · THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN SAGAS.
Reading edition
Hitherto, dealing exclusively with märchen, or tales told for simple amusement, we have found the incident of the Supernatural Birth, outside the cycle of the Perseus myth, widely scattered in Europe, in Asia as far east as Annam, southward among the Zulu kraals of Africa and northward among the snows of Greenland. Nor does it occur in modern folklore only. It formed one of the chain of events in a tale of wonder carefully guarded for us through the long silence of three thousand years by an Egyptian mummy, to whose arms it had been intrusted at his burial, a precious fragment of the literature he had known and loved in life, and therefore deemed a gift appropriate to his service in his everlasting home. But the story of Perseus was, at all events in early ages, believed as an actual occurrence by the simple folk of Greece and wherever Greek influence extended the hero’s cult. Has the possibility of a Supernatural Birth of this kind been credited elsewhere and under other conditions of culture? In a land dominated by Christian thought the question seems superfluous. The mystery taught by the creeds of the Church, however, is believed to be something apart from all the other beliefs of the world, something altogether above them, alike in its evidence and its consequences. Christians in thus thinking overlook the fact that to the believer in any religion its evidences are undeniable and its claims are supreme. The fact is that the incident in question is part and parcel of many other religions than the Christian, and is also gravely accepted among what we may call the secular and quasi-historical traditions of tribes in various parts of the Old and New World. Beyond this, as we shall see in another chapter, pregnancy is held actually producible by means analogous to those described in the legends, means outside the ordinary operations of nature. Into the bearing of these facts on the dogma of the Supernatural Birth of Jesus Christ, or on the historical evidence on which that dogma rests, it is not my purpose to inquire. This is a question of apologetics, not of folklore.
Many stories of Supernatural Birth belong to the cosmogonic legends of savage and barbarous tribes. These we may for the most part pass over. What may have happened to the monsters that in the dawn of things were the first to loom upon the horizon is hardly relevant. They may have had reasons of their own for their extraordinary conduct. Our business is with beings conceived in distinctly human terms and something like human proportions. The distinction may be hard to define, seeing that savage tribes hold savage opinions as to the power of men and brutes (or of some men, at least, and some brutes) to change their forms at will. In the same way märchen have no clear dividing line in the savage mind from sagas (or stories believed in as recording actual events) nor religious narratives from secular histories. It is one of the characteristics of savagery that these things are not as yet differentiated. Intellectual evolution is going on; but until a much higher grade of civilisation be reached we cannot be sure that the divergence is complete. If, therefore, some of the stories I am going to refer to seem scarcely within the limits I have laid down, these difficulties in the way of definition must be borne in mind.
“ ‘O thou star, that God created!
Of my son dost thou know nothing,
Where my darling son abideth,
Where my golden apple tarries?’
And the star made haste to answer:
‘If I knew I would not say it;
He it is who hath created
Me to gleam thro’ cold and evil,
Me to sparkle in the darkness.’ ”
The moon gives her the like answer. Then she meets the sun; and the sun tells her:
“ ‘Well I know thy little loved one.
He it is who hath created
Me thro’ all the hours of daylight
In the sheen of gold to dazzle,
Me to glint in sheen of silver.
Well I know thy little loved one.
Yonder, woman, is thy darling,
Plunged in marshes to the girdle,
In the moor e’en to the armpit.’ ”
Thus directed, Marjatta found her son and brought him home. He grew up beautiful but nameless. His mother called him Floweret, but strangers dubbed him Idler. An old man named Virokannas came to baptize and bless him, but hesitated to do so ere he had been examined and proved. Then came Väinämöinen old and trusty, who sentenced the boy, as he had been taken from the marsh and was sprung from a berry, to be laid upon the ground of the berry-bearing meadow, or taken to the marsh, and his head crushed with a tree. But the son of the berry replies:
“ ‘O thou old man without insight,
Without insight, full of folly!
Thou hast given a foolish sentence;
Ill thou hast the laws expounded!’ ”
Väinämöinen himself had taken the child of his own mother and thrown it into the water to redeem his own life. The boy reminds him of this, and hints that he will have to pay the penalty of his deed. Virokannas then quickly baptizes the boy, and blesses him to become king of Karjala and guardian of all powers.