Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/15



This story holds in solution, as it were, in a primitive form, a large number of other legends. The Three Hairs of Father Know-All is more primitive than the Miraculous Hair of the Servian legend, which is itself at least as ancient as the time of Virgil; for Virgil’s account of the death of Dido is copied minutely from it. Another form of the same legend is the Golden Fleece hung upon a tree, which the Argonauts went in search of. We shall meet with it again in the second half of the Hungarian-Slovenian story of the, where a gipsy, corresponding to Medea, causes the golden-hafred queen, seated on a rock, to be turned into a dove by thrusting a pin into her head. This portion of the legend has developed into a whole crop of stories of stepmothers or mothers-in-law turning their daughters into birds, which resume their human form when the pin is drawn out again. The Lorely is another form of the legend. It is the sunlight dancing on the crown of a rock. The legend of the Tailor crag at Troll-hatten, in Sweden, is another form of it. The tailor, condemned for murder, is to be spared if, seated on this precipice, between sunrise and sunset, he can sew a suit of clothes. He works for dear life. Just as the sun sets, he has finished, but at the same instant turns giddy and plunges headlong into the maélstrom below. Transplanted to the Cambridge fens, the legend reappears in Tennyson’s beautiful poem of the Lady of Shalott. Father Know-All, in his three forms of child, middle-aged man, and old man, also reappears in Vedic mythology under exactly the same name. In the Three Fates we have the Norns or Greek Parce, one of them being, in fact, represented as spinning. Their attendance at the birth of Plavachek is a more primitive form of the legend of the Magi. Just as in the Venetian legend of the basket of flowers we shall find that Capricornus, the Goat, in the Story of George and his Goat, has been metamorphosed into an enchanted basket of flowers; just as the Vedic horses, Harites, become the Three Graces of Greek mythology; so the three old women in the present myth become, in the later one of the birth of Christ, the three kings accompanied by a star in the East. In Plavachek we seem to have, in a primitive form, Moses in the basket of rushes; in the king’s impotent attempts to put him out of the way, the legend of Œdipus and that of Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents as well.

The part of the story relating how the fisherman saved Plavachek appears strangely developed into another story, Otesanek, or Little Shaveling. Here it is a woodcutter who brings home to his childless wife a tree-root shaped like a little baby. They called it Otesanek, and feed it with pap. This infant rapidly develops into an enfant terrible, who eats up its father and mother, everything and everybody who comes in his way, until he threatens to eat up an old woman hoeing greens. She throws her hoe at him; it splits open his stomach, and all his victims march merrily out again. Since this is an allegory of winter, it is evident that Plavachek is carried down by a late autumn flood. In the supplementary comparative essay, the different characters of these stories are analysed. The king as bowman corresponds to Sagittarius; the commencement of the story is therefore laid in the beginning of December or towards the end of November. The Otesanek