Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/34



the preceding story we have a transitional form to the various Lorelys. Didos, and luckless heroines turned into birds by a pin stuck into their brains, of which European folk-lore is full. Perhaps of all these stories the most instructive is the Servian legend of the Miraculous Hair. The poverty-stricken hero is warned in a vision that he will find under his bed-pillow an apple, a kerchief and a mirror. He is to follow a certain river to its source, where, on a crag, he will find a beautiful maiden seated with a work-frame in front of her, on which she is embroidering patterns with the sunbeams. He is not to reply to her questions or he will be instantly changed into a fish or a snake; but when she asks him to search her head for lice he is to do so; he will there find a blood-red hair, which he is to pluck out, and run away. He does all this; the maiden pursues him; he throws away the apple, then the kerchief, then the mirror; never having seen a mirror before, the Servian Lorely spends so much time coquetting with her own image in it that the man outstrips her, sells the hair to the Sultan, and makes his fortune. Just as the Servian legend of the radiant, amber-clear maiden the boy beholds under the bark of the fir-tree is due to the trementina spruce forest, 80 the plica polonica may have something to do with this form of the Lorely legend, which, as we shall find in the note to the, belongs to the last week of the annual myth epic, which consisted of one year, three months and a week; but the remarkable part of it is that this comparatively modern form of the legend, setting aside certain Christian embellishments, is certainly as old as Virgil’s Zineid, the death of Dido in the fourth book being imitated from it. Being a specialised form of legends which are variants, certainly, and most likely primitive forms of early Vedic myths, it must have drifted south from East-Central Europe. Virgil therefore took the particulars of Dido’s death from the myth: the myth was not developed from the poem. Likely enough, the two Venetian writers, Livy and Catullus, amused themselves by making collections of the folk-lore stories of their province, and thus they became popularised amongst literary Romans. Much more ancient, therefore, must be the more generalised legends like the, in which woodcutters, carvers, or gamekeepers represent seed-time and the waning autumn sun, and are variants, perhaps prototypes, of the Vedic demigorgon Tvashtar—represented, like his Latin counterpart, Vulcan, as lame and impotent. If the Virgilian legend, then, was borrowed from the Servian one, and this was a development of still more ancient myths coeval with Vedic ones and perhaps anterior, it is evident that the legend of the impotent Bethlehem carpenter, whose virgin wife is impregnated, like Tvashtar’s daughter, by a health-bearing wind, could not have given rise to them, but was itself merely a still later development of them. Christians, therefore, who affirm, by their religious and domestic practices at the end of the year, the historic truth of this Bethlehem fairy story, this last wreckage of the primitive annual-solar myth, act unwisely, for it is never wise to maintain by word or act that something is an historical fact when it is really the remains of a primitive allegory.