Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/66

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Magic Songs of the Finns.

recoiled from the rock. Then it wanted to strike animals, to enter a human skin, the body of a woman's son; but there is no place for it there whence it may return.


(d.)

A 'fiery' oak grew on a 'fiery' plain. A boy came from Pohjola, a full-grown man from the cold village, trailing behind a small hand-sledge on which lies a little .axe with a haft an ell long, with an edge a span high; the edge is new, the haft old. On his hands he wears new gloves worked with old embroidery. With his hands he began to batter the 'fiery' tree, to smash the 'sparkling' oak. He hewed it into splinters, cut it into chips, into litter for cows. A wind carried them to sea to be drifted by the sea waves to Tuoni's dark river, to the underlake of Manala. From them a wizard gets arrows, a devil pricking instruments.

The devil manufactures arrows, Lempo leaf-headed spears from branches of the 'fiery' oak, from splinters of the evil tree in a doorless, windowless smithy. An arrow from the devil, a leaf-headed spear from Lempo whizzed into a wretched human being's skin, into the body of one born of a woman.


(e.)

Udutar (daughter of Mist), Nature's daughter, Terhetar (d. of Fog), the sharp girl sifted mist with a sieve, kept scattering fog at the end of a misty promontory, at the extremity of a foggy island; from which circumstance burning pains have their origin, burning pains and pleurisies, in a naked skin, in a body racked with pain.


XXXVI.—Swelling on the Neck.

Strange swelling! Lempo's lump! I know your family, from what, excrescence! you originated, from what, horror of the land! you were bred, out of what, 'whorl of Lempo!' you were spun, out of what, ball of Lempo! you swelled