legends, there is very little else in the latter which is in common
with such Old World mythology as might have come to the Indians since
the discovery by Columbus. Excluding French Canadian fairy tales, what
we have left is chiefly Eskimo and Eddaic, and the proportion of the
latter is simply surprising. There are actually more incidents taken
from the Edda than there are from lower sources. I can only account for
this by the fact that, as the Indians tell me, all these tales were
once _poems_, handed down from generation to generation, and
always sung. Once they were religious. Now they are in a condition
analogous to that of the German Heldenbuch. They have been cast into a
new form, but they are not as yet quite degraded to the nursery tale.

It may be objected that if the Norsemen in Greenland were Christians it
is most unlikely that they would have taught the legends of the Edda to
the heathen; to which I reply that some scholar a few centuries hence
may declare it was a most improbable thing that Christian Roman
Catholic Indians should have taught me the tales of Glooskap and Lox.
But the truth is, we really know very little as to how soon wandering
Vikings went to America, or how many were here.

I would say in conclusion that, while these legends of the Wabanaki are
fragmentary and incomplete, they still read like the fragments of a
book whose subject was once broadly and coherently treated by a man of
genius. They are handled in the same bold and artistic manner as the
Norse. There is nothing like them in any other North American Indian
records. They are, especially those which are from the Passamaquoddy
and Penobscot, inspired with a genial cosmopolite humor. While Glooskap
is always a gentleman, Lox ranges from Punch to Satan; passing through
the stages of an Indian Mephistopheles and the Norse Loki, who appears
to have been his true progenitor. But neither is quite like anything to