Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/16

 story, it may be observed, occurs in various forms, the most obvious one being that of Red Cap or Red Riding Hood; linking it by means of the Red Cap with the Polish story of Hloupy Piecuch (Stupid Sit-by-the-Fire), and this with Cinderella. Red Cap straying among the forest flowers is the red winter sun straying amid the stars; and the fact of her ultimate disappearance into the maw of Fenris, the wolf, shows that this form of the legend was developed within the Arctic circle. The character of the woodcutter has split up into two in Grandfather Know-All. In these folk-lore stories he is sometimes represented as a gamekeeper; in the Vedic mythology he is called Tvashtar (lit., the coverer), the artificer or carpenter, and allegorises the waning autumn sun. As autumn is the seed-time, he is considered as a kind of Demogorgon. Like Vulcan, his Latin form, he is lame. In the Middle Ages this form dwindled to Asmodeus, the lame devil, who presides over mines and hid treasures, and appears in the Slavo-Genovese tale of the Three Brothers. In the Scandinavian legends he is Wayland Smith, and in the Christian ones, Joseph the Carpenter. All these personages have in common a wife or daughter whom they or their sons-in-law fail to render pregnant, and who has to have recourse to miraculous means of fertilisation. Vulcan’s wife is unfaithful with Mars. Tvashtar’s daughter is sometimes represented as a Virgin whom a Marut, or wind-god, fertilises; sometimes as the wife of the impotent Pandu who gets Vaju, the Zephyr or Holy Spirit, to supply his own shortcomings. Her name is Kunti. In the Christian form of the legend, the wind-god fertilises a virgin of the name of Mary; a name recalling on the one hand the Maruts, and on the other, Maya or Illusion, the mythical mother of Buddha.

The number twenty, which occurs in Grandfather Know-All, is unusual. Plavachek is twenty years old when his adventures begin. I offer the following explanation for what it may be worth. We know that the story begins in December. We also know that in very primitive times the year was reckoned in half—that is to say light and dark—moons. There would therefore bybe [sic] twenty-four of them to a year. Now supposing Plavachek’s age to be reckoned years for half moons, the twentieth would fall at the beginning of September, that is to say, at the end of summer; which tallies with the visit of the king in summer to the fisherman, his request for a drink of water, and his discovery of the twenty-year-old Plavachek. Giving the black sea incident to October, the two cities to November and December, the castle of gold to January, the events of the story distribute themselves as in the other annual fairy stories, concluding with the triumph of spring. Only that while many of the stories limit themselves to the three winter months, this one, including its prelude, covers a year and three months.