It is for the future to reveal whether or no the newly found gift of writing will lead these people on to extensive literature. The Moravians have published some well known books, such as “Christie’s Old Organ,” etc. If so, by the analogy of every literature in the world, it will begin with verse, by the enshrining of the folk tales immemorially dear to every nation, and by the composition of some sort of Eskimo saga. The Greenland Eskimos composed long songs in honour of Fridtjof Nansen before he took leave of them, after the first crossing of their icy continent. It may be that these Eskimo poems, printed in his book, together with Dr. Rink’s collection of “Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo,” and Dr. Boas’ similar collection of the fables of this people (“The Central Eskimo”) and the present writer’s contribution to the same subject, constitute so far the bulk of the offering made by these children of the arctic to the literature of mankind. CHAPTER XIII LEGENDS There exists among the Baffin Islanders, as among all the other tribes, one long consecutive legend in particular, which should rank, if not with the great Scandinavian and Icelandic Sagas beloved of William Morris and of Wagner, at least with some of the most picturesque of Grimm’s immortal fairy tales, and certainly with any of the strange and monstrous legends of Kalevala, the Finnish cycle of national song. Students of national story-telling will probably find analogies and relationships between the Eskimo story of “Sedna” and the characteristic folk tales of the other arctic or sub-arctic peoples east and west. “Sedna” is beguiled into marriage by a gallant hunter who is really not a man at all, but a sea bird. This sort of tragedy, or disillusionment, is common in Eskimo fable. In one Alaskan-Eskimo tale, the heroine marries the human semblance of a bear. The Sedna legend—a religious legend around which turns a large volume of Eskimo superstition—has its repulsive as well as its poetic aspects. But to one who has lived intimately with these people, it would seem that so strange and awesome a story of the wild north as the tragedy and death of Sedna should be set, in song, to the metre of Kalevala and Hiawatha. It is the metre of a child-like version of adventures happening to a child-like folk. Belief in this legend, in the existence and the power of Sedna, a maleficent sea-goddess of the underworld, forms a large part of the Eskimo religion, and the annual autumnal festival arising out of it is the principal celebration in their calendar. In connection with this phantasy, it is noteworthy that the Eskimo conception of the spirit of evil—or at least of hostility to man—is unlike that of any other nation. The Eskimo devil is a woman.