Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/26



story, perhaps a primitive form of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, occurs in various forms in the folk-lore of the Italianised Slavs of Venice. In the Venetian variants of the Slav stories there are several things worth noticing, for they prove conclusively that the Venetian folk-lore, or at all events the main bulk of it, comes directly from the Slav reservoir of Central and Eastern Europe, and not vice versâ. It might have been supposed that the Venetian fairy stories, like the Slav so Eastern in many of their aspects, had been brought direct from the East in the palmy days of Venetian grandeur and had thence penetrated among the Western Slavs; but this is not the case. One famous Venetian legend, that of the Merchant of Venice, is identical with, and perhaps has been taken from the episode of the Falcon and the Dove, which occurs in the Mahabharata, and has been so splendidly versified in the late Lord Lytton’s Glenaveril; but nothing resembling this story is at all general, if it occurs, amongst the folk-lore of the Western Slavs. On the other hand, many of the characteristics of annual myths have disappeared from the stories in the milder climate of Venice. In the Three Sisters and the Twelve Brothers, the frozen lords and their retainers take the form of marble statues, who are resuscitated by a vial of elixir found in the head of the enchanter; in the Dead Man, winter is simply represented by a dead man who comes to life after being watched by the heroine a year, three months, and & week—exactly the period, it will be observed, we have deduced from internal evidence as the period of the story,. But the most conclusive evidence is perhaps to be found in the punishment of the witches, step-mothers, and mothers-in-law of the Venetian Slav and the Central European Slav stories respectively. In the latter the invariable punishment is to be torn to pieces by four wild horses, perhaps representing the four points of the compass. In the former it is as invariably to be burnt alive on a barrel of tar. Now if the stories had been transplanted from Venice to the pine forests of Slavonia, Hungary, and Bohemia, there is no reason why this penalty should not have figured in the stories of Central Europe, the genial methods of Christian love having naturalised this horrible form of it all over Christendom in the Middle Ages; but there is an overwhelming reason why, transplanted to Venice, the Central European Slav stories should lose their horse element, namely that, from the nature of the case, there is not a single horse, carriage, cart, or pony to be found from one end of the city of Venice to the other. To anyone conversant with the stories in their original dialects, definite proofs of this kind are superfluous, the fact emerges in a thousand minute details of fact and manner, but to the general reader a general proof may be not unwelcome. Though not strictly relevant to the present story, another remarkable difference between the Central European and the Venetian Slav folk-lore is worth pointing out. In the former it is invariably the hero who undergoes hardships in search of the heroine, but in the Venetian variants it is quite as often the heroine who goes in search of and rescues the hero—an extraordinary fact when one considers the purely passive