but which we would call tradition; secondly, kukwanebu , fairy tales, recited for amusement, at definite seasons, and relating avowedly untrue events; thirdly, wosi , the various songs, and vinavina , ditties, chanted at play or under other special circumstances; and last, not least, megwa or yopa , the magical spells. All these classes are strictly distinguished from one another by name, function, social setting, and by certain formal characteristics. This brief outline of the Boyowan folk-lore in general must suffice here, as we cannot enter into more details, and the only class which interests us in the present connection is the first one, that called libogwo .
This, the ‘old talk,’ the body of ancient tradition, believed to be true, consists on the one hand of historical tales, such as the deeds of past chiefs, exploits in the Koya, stories of shipwreck, etc. On the other hand, the libogwo class also contains what the natives call lili’u—myths, narratives, deeply believed by them, held by them in reverence, and exercising an active influence on their conduct and tribal life. Now the natives distinguish definitely between myth and historic account, but this distinction is difficult to formulate, and cannot be stated but in a somewhat deliberate manner.
First of all, it must be borne in mind, that a native would not trouble spontaneously to analyse such distinctions and to put them into words. If an Ethnographer succeeded in making the problem clear to an intelligent informant (and I have tried and succeeded in doing this) the native would simply state:
“We all know that the stories about Tudava, about Kudayuri, about Tokosikuna, are *lili’u*; our fathers, our *kadada* (our maternal uncles) told us so; and we always hear these tales; we know them well; we know that there are no other tales besides them, which are *lili’u*. Thus, whenever we hear a story, we know whether it is a *lili’u* or not.”
Indeed, whenever a story is told, any native, even a boy, would be able to say whether this is one of his tribal lili’u or not. For the other tales, that is the historical ones, they have no special word, but they would describe the events as happening among ‘humans like ourselves.’ Thus tradition, from which the store of tales is received, hands them on labelled as lili’u, and the definition of a lili’u, is that it is a story transmitted with such a label. And even this definition is contained by the facts themselves, and not explicitly stated by the natives in their current stock of expressions.
For us, however, even this is not sufficient, and we have to search further, in order to see whether we cannot find other indices, other characteristic features which differentiate the world of mythical events from that of real ones. A reflection which would naturally present itself would be this: “Surely the natives place their myths in ancient, pre-historic times, while they put historical events into recent ages?” There is some truth in this, in so far as most of the historical events related by the natives are quite recent, have occurred within the community where they are told and can be directly connected with people and conditions existing at present, by memory of living man, by genealogies or other records. On the other hand, when historical events are told from other districts, and cannot be directly linked with the present, it would be erroneous to imagine that the natives place them into a definite compartment of time different from that of the myth. For it must be realised that these natives do not conceive of a past as of a lengthy duration, unrolling itself in successive stages of time. They have no idea of a long vista of historical occurrences, narrowing down and dimming as they recede towards a distant background of legend and myth, which stands out as something entirely different from the nearer planes. This view, so characteristic of the naive, historical thinking among ourselves, is entirely foreign to the natives. Whenever they speak of some event of the past, they distinguish whether it