Wonder Tales From Baltic Wizards

ENCHANTMENTS, Wizards, Witches, Magic Spells, Nixy Queens, Giants, Fairy White Reindeer, and glittering Treasures flourish in these tales from the Baltic Lands--Lapland (both Finnish and Scandinavian), Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And their setting is the Long Winter Night with its brilliant play of Northern Lights over the snow-covered tundra; or the brief Arctic summer--its sun burning night and day--with its birds, flowers, insect-clouds, singing waters, and almost tropic heat; or the golden sunshine of the southern amber coast. But it is the Northern Lights themselves, flashing and flaming through the dark heavens, that cast their mystic weirdness over many of these tales molded by the peculiar imagination of the Asiatic and European East Baltic folks. The farther our stories draw south from Lapland, the lower sink the Northern Lights, and the less their influence on folk-tales, till at last they merge with the warmer lights of Lithuania the amber-land. Wizards and wizardry abound in Lappish, Finnish, and Estonian tales, Witches appear more often in Latvian and Lithuanian ones. And in all these countries except Lapland, many European folk-tale themes, which we know in the Grimm collection, are found in new forms. The Latvians and Lithuanians are Aryan peoples. The Lapps came from Asia, and the Finns and Estonians are descendants of the Finno-Ugric tribes emigrating from Asia to the Baltic shores. The Lapps and Finns are famous for their Wizards and wizardry. Even today some Lapps use magic incantations which are peculiar admixtures of ancient heathen superstitions and Christian ideas. The modern Lapp who is only half taught in the Gospel of Christ the Lord, which frees from superstition, is a strange compound of heathen survivals accentuated by the hard conditions of life within the Arctic Circle.