Note 10.3 — Chapter VIII · THE LIFE-TOKEN IN TALE AND CUSTOM.

A handkerchief is a frequent gift. It becomes black, or more usually besmirched with blood.10.3 In a Vlach ballad just referred to, the lady delivers to her husband her veil, adorned with a border of golden broidery. “When the gold shall melt,” she says, “know thou that I am dead.” In a modern Greek tale from the island of Syra, two brothers, starting to seek for the magical bird Dikjeretto, leave their shirts with their sister. If misfortune meet them, the shirts will turn black.10.4 Each of three brothers in a Lithuanian story sets up at the crossway, ere they part, a blue banner, which will be stained with red—in other words, with blood—in the event of his death.10.5 In a story from Southern Russia, Ivan Popyaloff, going to fight the snake that withheld the daylight, hung up his gloves, desiring his brothers to hasten to his help if blood dropped from them.10.6 In another Russian story the hero thoughtfully puts a plate beneath, to catch the blood.11.1 Lemminkäinen, in the Kalevala, having brushed his beautiful hair, flings the brush upon the oven-posts, and declares that on harm’s happening to him it will shed blood. Accordingly, when he is done to death in the Underworld, his wife is made aware of the fact by the bristles dripping with gore.11.2 Mats made from the skins of beasts he has slain, and a pipe, are left behind with his foster-mother by a young Micmac brave, who goes to make war on the savage Culloos: she will see blood on them if he be killed.11.3 Strong Hans, in a tale from Syra, cannot be got to do anything but play his cither. When he sallies forth to fight the ogre, who has ravished away the king’s daughter, he tells his mother: “If you see that the strings of my cither are broken, then up and seek me!”11.4 In an obscure passage of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché, the heroes Hunhun-Ahpu and Vukub-Hunahpu appear to leave as their life-token with their mother the india-rubber ball with which they loved to play.11.5 One of the Torres Straits islanders told Professor Haddon a tale wherein a mother, while at work, breaks her digging-stick, and at once concludes that something has happened to her baby-boy. Sure enough it has; for a gust of wind had blown down his basket-cradle, and a man and his wife passing by have found the child in the grass and taken him away.11.6 Here the instrument neither belongs to, nor is it indicated by, the person affected. So in an Iroquois legend, when the hero starts in search of the daughter of a neighbouring chief, his uncle, under whose tutelage he is, brings out “a curious thing made of coloured string and elk-hair of deep red, about a foot long. ‘I shall keep this by me,’ said he, ‘and so long as you are doing well it will hang as it is; but if you are in danger it will come down itself almost to the ground, and if it does reach the ground you will die.’ ”12.1