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, Waeinaemoeinen, 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.[176] 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.[177]

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 and waters.

'These songs,' says the prelude, 'were found b