ESTHOXIA, FINLAND 299

inquiry Is more narrow. Folk-songs of one kind or another have
doubtless existed for miilenia, and they may even be, as Lonnrot
observed, as old as the human race; but ballads of the still extant
types have had a definite beginning. They may have been power-
fully influenced by pre-existing magical runes, though it would be
almost impossible to prove this by dated examples. They have
also exerted a reciprocal influence on the forms of the incantations.
But the only sure evidence of their date and provenience are the
marks they still bear: the dates indicated by their historical allu-
sions, the correspondence of their plots with those of neighbouring
lands, and the resemblances we have noted in their prosody.

These magical ballads throw light on the incantations in the two
national epics, and there are narratives also which relate epical
episodes. It is thus that, in the far North, we encounter again the
problem of epico-ballad relationships, and that under conditions
that seem to promise a definitive solution. This hope attracted to
their study one of the keenest minds of Europe, that of Donienico
Comparetti.1 The first ballad reproduced by Lonnrot is Suo-
metar's Wooers. Suometar is born from a duck's egg, and the
Moon, Sun, and North Star come to woo her; she refuses the Moon
as a wanderer and the Sun as capricious, but weds the North Star.
In this form the ballad is somewhat suspect, for it seems too tidy an
allegory to be traditional Suometar means, being interpreted,
Finland's daughter; and, apart from the difficult mythological
business about the egg, one understands only too easily why Fin-
land's daughter should marry the North Star. In the Kalevala
(xi, line 21 ff.) we have a more mythological presentation of the
same events: Kylli(kki) refuses Sun, Moon, and Star, but she is
not herself an allegory. Still more convincing is the episode of
Salmi's wooers in the Kalezipoeg (i. 177-450), where Salmi is a
goddess, not a representative figure, and accepts the North Star
after refusing the Moon and Sun. Her experience was repeated
in that of her daughter Linda (recited in the same canto), who had
many suitors before she took Kalev, the father of the hero.
Similarly, the second of Lonnrot's ballads, Lyylikfs Snow-running,
corresponds to the forging of snow-shoes for Lemminkainen by
Kauppi in the Kalevala (xiii), when Lemminkainen wished to hunt
Hiisi's elk. In this way the scholar has both the epos and the ballad

1 D. Comparetti, The Traditional Poetry of the Finns, transl. Isabella M.
Anderson, London, 1898.