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Appendix 21

A faint, though rather pleasant, echo of such huge events, comes from an Esthonian story about the Lake Eim changing his bed (Grimm, TM, p. 599):

On his banks lived wild and wicked men, who never mowed the meadows that he watered, nor sowed the fields he fertilized, but robbed and murdered, so that his bright wave was befouled with the blood of the slain. And the lake mourned; and one evening he called his fish together, and mounted with them into the air. The brigands hearing a din cried: “The Eim has left his bed, let us collect his fish and hidden treasure.” But the fish were gone, and nothing was found at the bottom but snakes, toads and salamanders, which came creeping out and lodged with the ruffian brood.

But the Eim rose higher and higher, and swept like a white cloud through the air; said the hunters in the woods: “What is this murky weather passing over us?” and the herdsmen: “What white swan is flying in the sky?” All night he hung among the stars, at morn the reapers spied him, how that he was sinking, and the white swan became as a white ship, and the ship as a dark drifting cloud. And out of the waters came a voice: “Get thee hence with thy harvest, I come to dwell with thee.” Then they bade him welcome, if he would bedew their fields and meadows, and he sank down and stretched himself in his new couch. They set his bed in order, built dikes, and planted young trees around to cool his face. Their fields he made fertile, their meadows green; and they danced around him, so that old men grew young for joy.

In a note, Grimm quotes F. Thiersch’s opinion on this lake:

Must not Eim be the same as Embach (mother-beck, fr. emma mother . . . ) near Dorpat, whose origin is reported as follows? When God had created heaven and earth, he wished to bestow on the beasts a king, to keep them in order, and commanded them to dig for his reception a deep broad beck, on whose banks he might walk; the earth dug out of it was to make a hill for the king to live on. All the beasts set to work, the hare measured the land, the fox’s brush tailing after him marked the course of the stream; when they had finished hollowing out the bed, God poured water into it out of his golden bowl.

How tough the life of tradition is! And how obvious — here, we mean it — that more is meant than the changing of the bed of a river or a lake; that rivers have their own method of establishing a new course, instead of flying, fish included, in the air and hanging among stars, is a fact that, we trust, was not unknown to our ancestors, whether Esthonians or not.