Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/101

 In the hands of Tycho Brahe, of Prague, and indeed much earlier, this idea was developed into the pseudo-science of astrology which occupied so large a field in the Middle Ages. Those who have walked over a plain or table-land thickly covered with snow on a starry winter’s night, know how intensely the mind is besieged by the idea of fate and fatality. This is the feeling or idea which has dressed the fates in white, with tapers in their hands. Interwoven in these stories to the inmost core is the presence of snow and ice. Carried to a warmer climate they may have melted into Indra myths and the like no Indra myth could ever have frozen into the Norns of Father Know-All.

In the Three Citrons the fates have become three periods presided over by three giants—at least in part. These periods are not exactly Past, Present, and Future, but they resemble them. There is first a sun-and-moonless period—chaos. The castle of lead. A sunless period—the castle of silver. A middle period, and so corresponding to the present; and a sunny period, the return of spring, the golden age we hope for but which never comes. In Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes a great change occurs. The vagueness in which fate was enveloped in the Three Citrons, where it was partly represented by the giants and partly by Jezibaba, has disappeared; again it has become three persons who are active helpmates of the hero and strongly individualized.

There are three stories in which these figures occur. In Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes we have—

In George and his Goat—