Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/55



story is one of the most complete of the West Slavonia annual solar or epic fairy stories, and it will be worth while dwelling upon it a little. It is a form of the Jack in the Bean Stalk legend, which occurs over the whole northern hemisphere from Dogger Indians to England, and has travelled south in its original form pretty near as far as the Siebenbürger. Transmitted from there through Bohemia to Slovenia, the branches the shepherd-hero carries with him from plateau to plateau, became transformed into dumplings, either through a deliberate play upon words or unconsciously—most likely the former. For in Bohemian, haluze means a branch (a small one), whereas in Slovenian the word halushki means dumplings, and the word konar a branch. Most likely it was from Slovenia that the tegend penetrated to Venice, where the whole of if occurs in an abridged and more or less mutilated form under the name of The Love of the Three Oranges. The second half of the story has also become another Venetian legend called The Dead Man. There are also traces of it in a third called El Vento (The Wind). In one or two particulars the Venetian and apparently modernized forms of the legend supplement the Slovenian legend; in fact, they render it possible to lay down a more or less definite chronological plan of the story, and this in its turn leads to some very remarkable conclusions. In the Venetian story of The Love of the Three Oranges, the legend has adapted itself to town life, and would hardly be recognizable as an annual solar legend were it not for the Slovenian one. The castles have become three old men, who send the hero on from one to the other when he asks them where he is to go for the love of the three oranges. The third sends him to an enchanted Venetian palace, the ground floor of which is full of cats, dogs, and witches. He duly pacifies them, goes upstairs and finds the three oranges on the chimney-piece in the drawing room. When the third beauty springs from the cleft orange (this happens on the journey home), he leaves her in charge of a washerwoman whose swarthy daughter takes the place of the gipsy in the Slovenian story. She sticks three pins into the head of the heroine, and when they are drawn one by one from the dove’s head, first an arm and a leg, then the other arm and leg, and lastly the whole person of the heroine re-emerges. It is particularly worth noticing that in this story, and also in that of The Dead Man, the wicked character is represented in one case as swarthy, in the other as a Moorish slave. This is a strong indication that the two stories have travelled south, for it is a particularly northern idea, and is in exact contradiction to the ideas of the Venetian common people as expressed in their popular sayings, of which the following are a few:

[Those whose hair-front forms an M ( ⌒⌒ ) are good and to be trusted.]