The Eighth Tribe, 1981 (8. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1981-02-01 / 2. szám

Page 4

THE EIGHTH TRIBE

February, 1981

strels' wages: — “A big stag with coins filling one of his ears, pancakes pierced by its horns, and a mug of beer on its tail.” ’

The SZEKELYS, living in the Eastern part of Transylvania, and calling themselves descendants of the Huns, have many ancient ballads about the enchanted stag. These ballads can be compared only to the ballads of the bards of Wales.

We can also find the legend of the stag with nearly all the members of the URAL-ALTAIC group, and even among people who belong to the INDOEUROPEAN lingual group. This latter group mixed in ancient times with the Ural-Altaic race. The Hindus, for example, believed that the Stag-god churned up the earth. The Persians have the story of the stag as one of their fairy-tales, in which the prince’s wife is the ancestral mother of the tribe. The Japanese version has the brothers quarreling during the chase of the stag. One brother sees the animal disappear toward the West, and follows him while the other brother searches for the trail toward the East, and discovers the Japanese Islands.

The stag is the idolized animal of ancient nomadic tribes which compose the ancestry of all the TURANIC nations. He carries the sun and the moon on his antlers, which means that the stag leads the chosen people from the dark into the light, from death into life, from an old country into a new.

It is an odd fact that in the legends of the closest relatives to the Hungarians, the Finno-Ugrian language family, the stag acts in exactly the opposite way. In the legend of the OSTJAKS, the two brothers chase a reindeer, while the entire tribe follows. The animal lures them far into the North, where he finally turns into fog when he “jumps onto the hard back of the sea”, and “his frozen tears begin to fall from heaven.” Only then do the brothers realize that “evil” in the form of a deer has lured them into peril,