Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/159

Rh became concentrated upon one or more festivals, chiefly Christmas and Easter. The result of this process—due to economical and political causes—was a mixture of rites, observances, and celebrations; so that in the mumming-plays we have rites of Yule-tide, along with dramatic reminiscences of the legend of St. George, which figures more individually in connection with Easter. But, if we take the St. George element of the Pace-Egg and the mumming-plays, and, collating them, compare the result with the earliest recorded dramatic presentation of the legend of St. George and the Dragon, we find that various features have been added, and, of these features, that some are common to both types, while in all important instances they are archaic, and belong to the earliest traditions.

But, granting for the moment that the main stem of the mumming-play is the legend of St. George, what does that represent, to begin with? It is an example of the skill with which the Church supplanted the pagan Pantheon. Yet was the policy hardly so successful as it appeared to be. For whether St. George represents the adoption by the Church of an important feature in the Northern mythology under another name, or the legend were of Eastern or Southern origin, the effect and result were the same. Under the first hypothesis we have Northern paganism thinly disguised; under the second we have a legend adopted in the country because it recognisably represented, let us say, Odin and his horse Sleipner, and the dragon suggested the dragon Nidhug, which dwelt by the fountain Hvergelmer in Niflheim. To dismiss the first hypothesis does not dispose of the second; and to prove that St. George was a Christian product would not dispose of the circumstance that, while the missionaries taught one thing, the folk were thinking of something else, superficially very much like it, but in fact totally different. On the supposition, then, that the main stem of the mumming-play is the St. George and Dragon legend, it places us in connection with the earliest history of our race in this