Page:Eskimo Life.djvu/302

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258
ESKIMO LIFE

own hindquarters, and when she bends sideways she can strike her cheek, with a loud smack, against her thigh. If you can look at her without laughing you are in no danger; but as soon as anyone begins to smile she throws away her drum, seizes him, hurls him to the earth, takes her knife and rips him up, tears out his entrails, throws them into the trough, and then greedily devours them.[1] In this story, too, we meet with more than one trait of Scandinavian tradition.[2] Thus 'the underground folk' cannot endure laughter; the human being who wounds them by laughing at them must pay dear for his thoughtlessness. And in two names for the Jotun-woman which are preserved in Snorro's Edda,[3] Bakrauf and Rifingafla ('the woman with the cleft or torn hindquarters') we find exactly the same idea which is represented in the ogress of the Greenland legend.

On the same journey the souls also pass the dwelling of the Moon Spirit. The way they have to go is described as very narrow, and one sinks in it up to the shoulders.[4] This reminds us of the bogs

  1. Note by Glahn in Crantz's Historie von Grönland, Copenhagen, 1771, p. 348. Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, p. 440; Danish edit. pp. 87, 166, suppl. p. 44.
  2. Communicated by Moltke Moe.
  3. I. 551, 553.
  4. Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, p. 440; Danish edit. p. 87.