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Updated: June 3, 2025
J. H. Trumbull has shown in his valuable work on the subject. Belonging to this division are the Micmacs of New Brunswick and the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes of Maine, who with the St. Francis Indians of Canada and some smaller clans call themselves the Wabanaki, a word derived from a root signifying white or light, intimating that they live nearest to the rising sun or the east.
This is simply and literally the Wochowsen or Windblower of the Wabanaki word for word, not the "Thunder-Bird" of the Western Indians. The second birth on earth, according to the Edda, was that of man. Odin found Ash and Elm "nearly powerless," and gave them sense. This was the first man and woman. According to the Indians of Maine, Glooskap made the first men from the ash-tree.
Over all the Land of the Wabanaki there is no place which was not marked by the hand of the Master. And it is to be seen on hills and rivers and great roads, as well as mighty rocks, which were in their day living monsters. For it is said that he meant to visit Partridge Island and Cape Blomidon, but they who were with him had got tired of the sea, and wished to cross over by land.
D. Moncure Conway once said to me, as Miss E. Robins has also said in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, that it is only in the Norse mythology that the Evil One, or devil, is represented as growing up from or inspired solely by reckless wanton mischief, the mischief of a bad boy or a monkey. But the very same is as true of so much of a devil as there is in the Wabanaki mythology.
It is at least certain, as the reader may convince himself, that these Wabanaki, or Northeastern Algonquin, legends give, with few exceptions, in full and coherently, many tales which have only reached us in a broken, imperfect form, from other sources.
The Wabanaki have in common the traditions of a grand mythology, the central figure of which is a demigod or hero, who, while he is always great, consistent, and benevolent, and never devoid of dignity, presents traits which are very much more like those of Odin and Thor, with not a little of Pantagruel, than anything in the characters of the Chippewa Manobozho, or the Iroquois Hiawatha.
In the Edda the mistletoe, the softest, and apparently the least injurious, of plants, kills Balder; in the Wabanaki tale it is a ball of down or a rush. The Chippewas change it, like savages, to a substantial root and a black rock, thereby manifesting an insensibility to the point of the original, which is that the most trifling thing may be the cause of the most terrible events.
When we, however, remember that the Eskimo once ranged as far south as Massachusetts, that they did not reach Greenland till the fourteenth century, that they had for three centuries intimate relations with Scandinavians, that they were very fond of legends, and that the Wabanaki even now mingle with them, the marvel would be that the Norsemen had not left among them traces of their tales or of their religion.
Then he, too, ran down to the river and out on a tree, and, seeing a fine salmon, caught at it with his claws. But he had not learned the art, and so fell into the river, and was swept away by the rushing current. This is one of AEsop's fables Indianized and oddly eked out with a fragment from a myth attributed to both Manobozho and the Wabanaki Rabbit.
How Glooskap made the Elves and Fairies, and then Man of an Ash Tree, and last of all, Beasts, and of his Coming at the Last Day. Glooskap came first of all into this country, into Nova Scotia, Maine, Canada, into the land of the Wabanaki, next to sunrise. First born were the Mikumwess, the Oonabgemessuk, the small Elves, little men, dwellers in rocks.
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