Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/88

god, and after the child’s birth he seeks to evade the promise. This seems to point to a primitive custom of sacrificing a first-born child in cases where barrenness had been removed. We know, besides, that the Irish sacrificed the firstlings of every issue, and the chief scions of every clan were offered to Cromm Cruach (R.C. xvi. 35); the church preached against the slaying of the yoke oxen and milk-cows and burning of the first-born progeny; the same custom is reflected also in the story that the Fomori required a third of children, corn and milk (Lebor Gabála). It is consequently possible that the Mysterious Hand motive may have developed out of such an old belief, the Mysterious Hand belonging—as we can gather from the Modern Gaelic stories—to a giant (Scotch Gael, famhair) who took the rôle of the old Fomorian. In favour of this explanation we may mention the fact that in the first branch of the Mabinogi there are really traces of the Removed Barrenness Cycle, which so often occurs in association with the Child's sacrifice. [Therefore, I cannot quite agree with Prof. Kittredge's suggestion that in the Mabinogi originally three children were stolen, the first two incidents having been suppressed in order to render the Calumniated Woman continuation feasible. This suggestion is unnecessary, because the Calumniated Woman is also sometimes bereft of three children, as is also the case in the female Taboo-breaker motive.] There is, however, the Grendel motive to be considered: here the monster does not steal any children, and yet he appears in the same way. We have then to accept that it was probably assumed that the first-born son, in a case of removed barrenness, was forfeited to some horrible monster closely related to the cannibals of the folk-tales (where the main objects of cannibal attacks are especially the children). In such tales the cannibals are sometimes supernatural beings, and possibly their character may have risen—at least partly—from the human sacrifices, and so we must not be