Dwarfs and Cranes. Baltic-Finnish Mythologies in Eurasian and American Perspective (70 years after Yrjö Toivonen)

Abstract

Tales about the struggle between dwarfs and birds are widespread across Eurasia and the Americas. About half of them were known to Toivonen (1937), but a large part of the American and some of the Asian materials remained beyond the scope of his research. The southernmost Eurasian version is from Nagaland. The closest parallels are between Ancient Greek, Fennoscandian, Chinese, Lower Amur and North-American tales. In eastern South America (Upper Xingu) dwarfs at the edge of the earth are replaced with the souls of the dead in the sky. Among 35,000 texts included into the author's electronic database, about 100 Eurasian, North-and South-American cases are relevant to the theme. Several motifs, partially overlapped and variously combined, reflect a unique set of cosmological ideas. Creatures different from (normal) human beings who live in a distant land fight with non-human enemies (birds, crabs, hares, etc.); man readily helps these creatures because for him their enemies are not dangerous; birds attack man who comes to the other world; migratory birds fly from our world to another one; at the boundary, sky is constantly moving in respect to earth or the opening leading to other world is narrow, many birds perish; there is a person at the passage to other world who feeds on birds; mistress of birds lives on the other side of the moving obstacle. The spread of this complex across all the New World allows us to date the corresponding ideas to the time of the initial peopling of the Americas (about 14,000 BP). The complex had taken its final shape in Northern Eurasia. The existence of South American versions and the absence of parallels in Australia and most of South and Southeast Asia (African materials are still not processed) is evidence in favor of historic connections between all known cases. Ecological factors are not sufficient to explain their independent emergence.

Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1930–2019)

“…Note also, that a fairly detailed reconstruction of the ancient beliefs of human populations is possible by means of quantitative stylistic analysis of modern databases of folklore and mythological motifs (Berezkin 2003(Berezkin , 2005(Berezkin , 2007a(Berezkin , 2007b(Berezkin , 2010(Berezkin , 2015D'Huy 2012D'Huy , 2013Korotayev 2006;Korotayev et al 2006Korotayev et al , 2017. On the other hand, it has been shown that the verification of these reconstructions is possible with the use of genetic data (see, e.g., Korotayev 2004aKorotayev , 2004bBorinskaya and Korotayev 2007;Wilson 2008).…”

Matriarchy and prehistory: a statistical method for testing an old theory

“…Raghavan et al 2014, Skoglund et al 2015). Additionally, several papers in comparative mythology based on different methods leads to the same conclusions (Berezkin 2007a, b, 2009, 2013; Le Quellec 2014, 2015). The fact that multiple sources of evidence are in agreement leads to very strong conclusions.…”

The Pleiades as Openings, The Milky Way as the Path of Birds, and The Girl On the Moon: cultural links across Northern Eurasia

“…The latter is elaborated e.g. among the native peoples of Alaska, North American Northwest Coast and some South American Indians (Berezkin 2007) but 'path of birds' is unknown to most of these groups.…”