The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-DayChamberlain, Alexander Francis
Science
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis
Child rearing; Children -- Folklore; Folklore and children
A glance into St. Nicholas, or at the returns to the syllabus on dolls
sent out by President Hall, is sufficient to indicate the farreaching
associations of the subject, while the doll-congress of St. Petersburg
has had its imitators both in Europe and America. A bibliography of
doll-poems, doll-descriptions, doll-parties, doll-funerals, and the like
would be a welcome addition to the literature of dolls, while a
doll-museum of extended scope would be at once entertaining and of great
scientific value.
The familiar phrase "to cry for the moon" corresponds to the French
"prendre la lune avec ses dents." In illustration of this proverbial
expression, which Rabelais used in the form _Je ne suis point clerc
pour prendre la lune avec les dents_, Loubens tells the amusing story
of a servant who, when upbraided by the parents for not giving to a
child what it wanted and for which it had been long crying, answered:
"You must give it him yourself. A quarter-of-an-hour ago, he saw the
moon at the bottom of a bucket of water, and wants me to give it him.
That's all." (_Prov. et locut. franç_., p. 225.)
To-day children cry for the moon in vain, but 'twas not ever thus. In
payment for the church, which King Olaf wanted to have built,--a task
impossible, the saint thought,--the giant demanded "the sun and moon, or
St. Olaf himself." Soon the building was almost completed, and St. Olaf
was in great perplexity at the unexpected progress of the work. As he
was wandering about "he heard a child cry inside a mountain, and a
giant-woman hush it with these words: 'Hush! hush! to-morrow comes thy
father Wind-and-Weather home, bringing both sun and moon, or saintly
Olaf's self.'" Had not the king overheard this, and, by learning the
giant's name, been enabled to crush him, the child could have had his
playthings the next day.
In the course of an incarnation-myth of the raven among the Haida
Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, Mr. Mackenzie tells us (497.
53):--
"In time the woman bore a son, a remarkably small child. This child
incessantly cried for the moon to play with, thus--_Koong-ah-ah,
Koong-ah-ah_ ('the moon, the moon'). The spirit-chief, in order to
quiet the child, after carefully closing all apertures of the house,
produced the moon, and gave it to the child to play with." The result
was that the raven (the child) ran off with the moon, and the people in
consequence were put to no little inconvenience. But by and by the raven
broke the original moon in two, threw half up into the sky, which became
the sun, while of the other half he made the moon, and of the little
bits, which were left in the breaking, all the stars.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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