n a
Scotch ballad. We are among a people which endows everything with human
characters and life, which is in familiar relations with birds, and
beasts, and even with rocks and plants. Ravens and wolves and fishes of
the sea, sun, moon, and stars, are kindly or churlish; drops of blood
find speech, man and maid change to snake or swan and resume their forms,
ships have magic powers, like the ships of the Phaeacians.

Then there is the oddest confusion of every stage of religious
development: we find a supreme God, delighting in righteousness; Ukko,
the lord of the vault of air, who stands apart from men, and sends his
son, Wainamoinen, to be their teacher in music and agriculture.

Across this faith comes a religion of petrified abstractions like those
of the Roman Pantheon. There are gods of colour, a goddess of weaving, a
goddess of man's blood, besides elemental spirits of woods and waters,
and the manes of the dead. Meanwhile, the working faith of the people is
the belief in magic--generally a sign of the lower culture. It is
supposed that the knowledge of certain magic words gives power over the
elemental bodies which obey them; it is held that the will of a distant
sorcerer can cross the lakes and plains like the breath of a fantastic
frost, with power to change an enemy to ice or stone. Traces remain of
the worship of animals: there is a hymn to the bear; a dance like the
bear-dance of the American Indians; and another hymn tells of the birth
and power of the serpent. Across all, and closing all, comes a hostile
account of the origin of Christianity--the end of joy and music.

How primitive was the condition of the authors of this medley of beliefs
is best proved by the survival of the custom called exogamy. {164a} This
custom, which is not peculiar to the Finns, but is probably a universal
note of early society, prohibits marriage between members of the same
tribe. Consequently, the main action, such as it is, of the 'Kalevala'
turns on the efforts made by the men of Kaleva to obtain brides from the
hostile tribe of Pohja. {164b}

Further proof of ancient origin is to be found in what is the great
literary beauty of the poem--its pure spontaneity and simplicity. It is
the production of an intensely imaginative race, to which song came as
the most natural expression of joy and sorrow, terror or triumph--a class
which lay near to nature's secret, and was not out of sympathy with the
wild kin of woods a