Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/116

 needless to point out that we have the Lapp form of the incident of the flute in Jank a Hanka, the Upper Lusatian equivalent of the German Hans and Grettel. The gingerbread-maker is fattening the children up to eat them, and requests Hans to put out his finger to see if he is yet fat enough ; he proffers his shepherd’s pipe, and old Wjera hacks away at it, and says: “Oh! no, he's much too tough yet.” In the way the heroine saves her lover from being eaten, we have a primitive form of the incidents at the castle of the wind, the moon, and the sun in King Raven: one of the Venetian variants of the Three Citrons. The three chests, blue, white, and red, seem to correspond to the castles of lead, silver, and gold; the dark moon, the light moon, and the sun periods; the three knots to the cutting open of the three citrons—perhaps blood oranges. It was a primitive Lapp superstition that three knots tied in a handkerchief steeped in the blood of a virgin had this power of raising storms. Many similar superstitions occur in Lapland, which are exactly remirrored in Latin ones as given by Pliny. They are common in Venice to this day. The untying of the winds is an incident that has assumed various forms. We have it in the first book of Virgil’s Æneid. It occurs again in the legend of the Argonauts, so strikingly similar to this Lapland poem. When Æetes pursues the Argonauts on their homeward journey, Medea dismembers her young brother Absyrtos, and throws his limbs into the sea. Æetes stops to pick up the remains of his child, and Jason and Medea escape. We have seen the legend in a different form in the story of the Miraculous Hair. There are, in fact, a whole crop of stories in which the lovers escape the sorceress by throwing behind them a brush, a mirror, and a razor, which change into thickets, a lake, and a quantity of razors; the witch trips over these and is cut to pieces. In the Polish story of the Skeleton King, we find even the indignation at the sweat and smell of the fugitive reproduced. Before flying from her father’s house, the princess spits upon the pane of glass; she and her lover then locked the door and fled. The spittle at once froze. When the servants of King Skeleton go to summon the prince they find the door locked ; and when they summon the prince it exclaims: “Immediately.” After being once or twice choused in this way they break open the door, and find the spittle splitting with laughter on the frozen pane. When the father pursues the lovers the princess first changes herself into a river and her lover into a bridge across it; next they change into a wood; and lastly the princess changes herself into a church, and her lover into the bell, and in this way they escape. In place of the castle of lead in the Siebenbürgen variant is a copper-coloured well into which the hero dips his hand, which also becomes copper-coloured. In the Servian legend of the Two Brothers, again, the brother who goes by the lower road, the three days’ journey through the other world, comes to a lake which he has to swim across, and when he comes out he and his dog are all gilded. In the Virgin Mary Godmother (Upper Lusatian) the naughty godchild thrusts its finger through the keyhole of the