Hero Tales of the Far NorthRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
Hero Tales of the Far North
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Scandinavia -- History
The Eskimos soon came to know that Egede was their friend. When
his boat entered a fjord where they were fishing, and his rowers
shouted out that the good priest had come who had news of God, they
dropped their work and flocked out to meet him. Then he spoke to
a floating congregation, simply as if they were children, and, as
with Him whose message he bore, “the people heard him gladly.” They
took him to their sick, and asked him to breathe upon them, which
he did to humor them, until he found out that it was an Angekok
practice, whereupon he refused. Once, after he had spoken of the
raising of Lazarus from the dead, they took him to a new-made grave
and asked him, too, to bring back their dead. They brought him a
blind man to be healed. Egede looked upon them in sorrowful pity.
“I can do nothing,” he said; “but if he believes in Jesus, He has
the power and can do it.”
“I do believe,” shouted the blind man: “let Him heal me.” It
occurred to Egede, perhaps as a mere effort at cleanliness, to wash
his eyes in cognac, and he sent him away with words of comfort. He
did not see his patient again for thirteen years. Then he was in a
crowd of Eskimos who came to Godthaab. The man saw as well as Egede.
“Do you remember?” he said, “you washed my eyes with sharp water,
and the Son of God in whom I believed, He made me to see.”
Children the Eskimos were in their idolatry, and children they
remained as Christians. By Egede’s prayers they set great store.
“You ask for us,” they told him. “God does not hear us; He does
not understand Eskimo.” Of God they spoke as “Him up there.” They
believed that the souls of the dead went up on the rainbow, and,
reaching the moon that night, rested there in the moon’s house,
on a bench covered with the white skins of young polar bears.
There they danced and played games, and the northern lights were
the young people playing ball. Afterward they lived in houses on
the shore of a big lake overshadowed by a snow mountain. When the
waters ran over the edge of the lake, it rained on earth. When the
“moon was dark,” it was down on earth catching seal for a living.
Thunder was caused by two old women shaking a dried sealskin
between them; the lightning came when they turned the white side
out. The “Big Nail” we have heard of as the Eskimos’ Pole, was a
high-pointed mountain in the Farthest North on which the sky rested
and turned around with the sun, moon, and stars. Up there the stars
were much bigger. Orion’s Belt was so near that you had to carry a
whip to drive him away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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