These latitudes have
invariably produced nations whose influence has been felt in an
elevating power over the world. From such a source the Indian could
have derived none of him vague symbolisms and mental idiosyncrasies
which have left him as he is found to-day, without a government and
without a god."
This is all perfectly true of the myths of Hiawat'ha-Manobozho. Nothing
on earth could be more unlike the Norse legends than the "Indian Edda"
of the Chippewas and Ottawas. But it was not known to this writer that
there already existed in Northeastern America a stupendous mythology,
derived from a land of storms and fire more terrible and wonderful than
Iceland; nay, so terrible that Icelanders themselves were appalled by
it. "This country," says the Abbe Morillot, "is the one most suggestive
of superstition. Everything there, sea, earth, or heaven, is strange."
The wild cries which rise from the depths of the caverned ice-hills,
and are reechoed by the rocks, icebergs, or waves, were dreadful to
Egbert Olafson in the seventeenth century. The interior is a desert
without parallel for desolation. A frozen Sahara seen by Northern
lightning and midnight suns is but a suggestion of this land. The sober
Moravian missionary Crantz once only in his life rose to poetry, when
more than a century ago he spoke of its scenery. Here then was the
latitude of storm and fire required by Schoolcraft to produce something
wilder and grander than he had ever found among Indians.
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