Staining all the waves with crimson, With the crimson of its life-blood, Filling all the air with splendour, With the splendour of its plumage?'
The story goes on to tell how the hunter speeds westward in pursuit of the Red Swan. At lodges where he rests, they tell him she has often passed there, but those who followed her have never returned. She is the daughter of an old magician who has lost his scalp, which Ojibwa succeeds in recovering for him and puts back on his head, and the old man rises from the earth, no longer aged and decrepit, but splendid in youthful glory. Ojibwa departs, and the magician calls forth the beautiful maiden, now not his daughter but his sister, and gives her to his victorious friend. It was in after days, when Ojibwa had gone home with his bride, that he travelled forth, and coming to an opening in the earth, descended and came to the abode of departed spirits; there he could behold the bright western region of the good, and the dark cloud of wickedness. But the spirits told him that his brethren at home were quarrelling for the possession of his wife, and at last, after long wandering, this Red Indian Odysseus returned to his mourning constant Penelope, laid the magic arrows to his bow, and stretched the wicked suitors dead at his feet.[1] Thus savage legends from Polynesia and America, possibly indeed shaped under European influence, agree with the theory[2] that Odysseus visiting the Elysian fields, or Orpheus descending to the land of Hades to bring back the 'wide-shining' Eurydikê, are but the Sun himself descending to, and ascending from, the world below.
Where Night and Hades take personal shape in myth,
1 Schoolcraft, 'Algic Res.' vol. ii. pp. 1-33. The three arrows recur in Manabozho's slaying the Shining Manitu, vol. i. p. 153. See the remarkably corresponding three magic arrows in Orvar Odd's Saga; Nilsson, 'Stone Age,' p. 197. The Red-Swan myth of sunset is introduced in George Eliot's 'Spanish Gypsy,' p. 63; Longfellow, 'Hiawatha,' xii.
2 See Kuhn's 'Zeitschrift,' 1860, vol. ix. p. 212; Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. ii. p. 127; Cox, 'Mythology,' vol. i. p. 256, vol. ii. p. 239.
