The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F. Chamberlain (read full novel txt) 📖

CHILDREN’S FLOWERS, PLANTS, AND TREES.

As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourishes. —_Psalm_ ciii. 15.

A child at play in meadows green, Plucking the fragrant flowers, Chasing the white-winged butterflies,— So sweet are childhood’s hours.

We meet wi’ blythesome and kythesome cheerie weans, Daffin’ and laughin’ far adoon the leafy lanes, Wi’ gowans and buttercups buskin’ the thorny wands— Sweetly singin’ wi’ the flower-branch wavin’ in their hands.

Many savage nations worship trees, and I really think my first feeling would be one of delight and interest rather than of surprise, if some day when I am alone in a wood, one of the trees were to speak to me.—_Sir John Lubbock_.

O who can tell The hidden power of herbs, and might of magic spell?—_Spenser_.

Plant Life and Human Life.

Flowers, plants, and trees have ever been interwoven with the fate of man in the minds of poets and folk-thinkers. The great Hebrew psalmist declared: “As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourisheth,” and the old Greeks said beautifully, [greek: oiæper phyllôn geneæ, toiæde kai andrôn], “as is the generation of leaves, so is also that of men”; or, to quote the words of Homer (_Iliad_, vi. 146):—

“Like as the generation of leaves, so also is that of men; For the wind strews the leaves on the ground; but the forest, Putting forth fresh buds, grows on, and spring will presently return. Thus with the generation of men; the one blooms, the other fades away.”

One derivation (a folk-etymology, perhaps) suggested for the Greek [Greek: anthropos] connects it with [Greek: anthos], making man to be “that which springs up like a flower.” We ourselves speak of the “flower of chivalry,” the “bloom of youth,” “budding youth”; the poets call a little child a “flower,” a “bud,” a “blossom,”—Herrick even terms an infant “a virgin flosculet.” Plants, beasts, men, cities, civilizations, grow and flourish; the selfsame words are applied to them all.

The same idea comes out strongly in the words relating to birth and childhood in the languages of many primitive peoples. With the Cakchiquel Indians of Guatemala the term boz has the following meanings: “to issue forth; (of flowers) to open, to blow; (of a butterfly) to come forth from the cocoon; (of chicks) to come forth from the egg; (of grains of maize) to burst; (of men) to be born”; in Nahuatl (Aztec), itzmolini signifies “to sprout, to grow, to be born”; in Delaware, an Algonkian Indian dialect, mehittuk, “tree,” mehittgus, “twig,” mehittachpin, “to be born,” seem related, while gischigin means “to ripen, to mature, to be born.”

In many tongues the words for “young” reveal the same flow of thought. In Maya, an Indian language of Yucatan, yax signifies “green, fresh, young”; in Nahuatl, yancuic, “green, fresh, new,” and yancuic pilla, “a newborn babe”; in Chippeway, oshki, “new, fresh, young,” whence oshkigin, “young shoot,” oshkinawe, “lad, youth,” oshkinig, “newly born,” oshkinaiaa, “a new or young object,” oshkiaiaans, “a young animal or bird,” oshkiabinodji_, “babe, infant, newborn child”; in Karankawa, an Indian language of Texas, kwa’-an, “child, young,” signifies literally “growing,” from ka’-awan, “to grow” (said of animals and plants).

Our English words lad and lass, which came to the language from Celtic sources, find their cognate in the Gothic jugga-lauths, “young lad, young man,” where jugga means “young,” and lauths is related to the verb liudan, “to grow, to spring up,” from which root we have also the German Leute and the obsolete English leet, for “people” were originally “the grown, the sprung up.”

Maid (maiden), Anglo-Saxon moegd, Modern High German Magd, Gothic magaths (and here belongs also old English may) is an old Teutonic word for “virgin, young girl.” The Gothic magaths is a derivative from magus, “son, boy, servant,” cognate with Old Irish mac, “boy, son, youth,” mog (mug), “slave,” Old Norse mqgr, “son,” Anglo-Saxon mago, “son, youth, servant, man,” the radical of all these terms being mag, “to have power, to increase, to grow,”—the Gothic magus was properly “a growing (boy),” a “maid” is “a growing (girl).” The same idea underlies the month-name May, for, to the Romans, this was “the month of growth,”—flowery, bounteous May,—and dedicated to Maia, “the increaser,” but curiously, as Ovid tells us, the common people considered it unlucky to marry in May, for then the rites of Bona Dea, the goddess of chastity, and the feasts of the dead, were celebrated.

Plant-Lore.

The study of dendanthropology and human florigeny would lead us wide afield. The ancient Semitic peoples of Asia Minor had their “Tree of Life,” which later religions have spiritualized, and more than one race has ascribed its origin to trees. The Carib Indians believed that mankind—woman especially—were first created from two trees (509. 109). According to a myth of the Siouan Indians, the first two human beings stood rooted as trees in the ground for many ages, until a great snake gnawed at the roots, so that they got loose and became the first Indians. In the old Norse cosmogony, two human beings—man and woman—were created from two trees—ash and elm—that stood on the seashore; while Tacitus states that the holy grove of the Semnones was held to be the cradle of the nation, and in Saxony, men are said to have grown from trees. The Maya Indians called themselves “sons of the trees”

(509. 180, 264).

Doctor Beauchamp reports a legend of the Iroquois Indians, according to which a god came to earth and sowed five handfuls of seed, and these, changing to worms, were taken possession of by spirits, changed to children, and became the ancestors of the Five Nations (480. IV. 297).

Classical mythology, along with dryads and tree-nymphs of all sorts, furnishes us with a multitude of myths of the metamorphosis of human beings into trees, plants, and flowers. Among the most familiar stories are those of Adonis, Crocus, Phyllis, Narcissus, Leucothea, Hyacinthus, Syrinx, Clytie, Daphne, Orchis, Lotis, Philemon and Baucis, Atys, etc. All over the world we find myths of like import.

A typical example is the Algonkian Indian legend of the transformation of Mishosha, the magician, into the sugar-maple,—the name aninatik or ininatik is interpreted by folk-etymology as “man-tree,” the sap being the life-blood of Mishosha. Gluskap, the culture-hero of the Micmacs, once changed “a mighty man” into the cedar-tree.

Many of the peculiarities of trees and plants are explained by the folk as resulting from their having once been human creatures.

Grimm and Ploss have called attention to the widespread custom of planting trees on the occasion of the birth of a child, the idea being that some sort of connection between the plant and the human existed and would show itself sympathetically. In Switzerland, where the belief is that the child thrives with the tree, or vice versa, apple-trees are planted for boys and pear-or nut-trees for girls. Among the Jews, a cedar was planted for a boy and a pine for a girl, while for the wedding canopy, branches were cut from both these trees (385. 6). From this thought the orators and psalmists of old Israel drew many a noble and inspiring figure, such as that used by David: “The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.” Here belong also “flourishing like a green bay-tree,” and the remark of the Captain in Shakespeare’s King Richard Second:—

“‘Tis thought the king is dead. We will not stay; The bay-trees in our country are all withered.”

Child-Flowers and -Plants.

The planting of trees for the hero or the heroine and the belief that these wither when a death is near, blossom when a happy event approaches, and in many ways react to the fate and fortune of their human fellows, occur very frequently in fairy-tales and legends.

There is a sweet Tyrolian legend of “a poor idiot boy, who lived alone in the forest and was never heard to say any words but ‘Ave Maria.’ After his death a lily sprang up on his grave, on whose petals ‘Ave Maria’ might be distinctly read.” (416. 216).

An old Greek myth relates that the Crocus “sprang from the blood of the infant Crocus, who was accidentally struck by a metal disc thrown by Mercury, whilst playing a game” (448.299). In Ossianic