It is this sense of strangeness, this "sleep-walking mystery," as Lanier calls it, that haunts the aboriginal American tale. It is of the same cultus as the Celtic, and both loom above the horizon of later English culture as distinctly aboriginal and belonging to preexistent races that occupied the soil ages before the transplanting of the dominant English type in Britain and America. Like the vanishing fauna of an invaded land, these ancient culture tales linger in remote places, amid aboriginal surroundings, elusive, and disappearing with the encroachment of the newer life.
In the early years of the last century Henry Schoolcraft gathered a number of Algonquin folk tales taken directly from aboriginal storytellers around lodge fires in the then remote wilderness of the Northwest—about the upper lake region and the headwaters of the Mississippi. These form the basis of his "Algic Researches," first published in 1839, and of later editions and compilations, one of which is the Indian Fairy Book. What Geoffrey of Monmouth did for the Celtic romances in his "History of The Britons," Schoolcraft has done for these Algonquin legends—given them an enduring place in the literature of English-speaking peoples. Both sources of legend have lent their matter to the verse of later English poets—Idylls of the King, the Morte d'Arthur and Hiawatha—reset fragments from an earlier period of epic the sources of which lie far back in the dim, mythopceic past.
The likeness of the primitive mind in two so widely separated culture areas as Britain and aboriginal North America, as revealed in both sets of tales, is seen in the overcoming of obstacles, often of superhuman character, by feats of prowess aided by magic. Indeed, magic plays the chief part, as it does in the tales of all primitive folk. In an Ojibwa story—The Red Swan—a younger brother sets forth in quest of a mysterious bird that he has hit with a magic arrow. He traverses wide stretches of country, coming on the evening of the second day to the lodge of an old magician who feeds him from a magic kettle and who encourages him to go forward in his enterprise. "Often has this Red Swan passed," the old man tells him, "and those who have followed it have never returned: but you must be firm in your resolution, and be prepared for all events." On the evening of the third day he reaches the lodge of another old man, similar in every respect to the first, and in like manner a third old man entertains him the following night, each with the same magic kettle. When the youth has finished eating this last old man thus addresses him:
