Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/57

 all in common the following: (1) A shining maiden seated aloft (except in the Argonaut legend, where she has become a golden fleece); (2) a river, sea, or piece of water below her; (3) a dark, sinister, or adverse person, who comes from below, meddles with her hair, and thus bewitches her—except in the Lorely legend where the tables are turned.

This event occurs some time in March, when the triumph of the spring of life has been definitely assured, and the sunlight has been rescued from its imprisonment during winter in the pitch-dark underworld.

The action of this kind of epilogue is comprised within exactly seven days, or a week. Translating the allegory into general terms, it evidently is intended to represent something of the following kind. The sunlight dancing on a rock, increasing every day in power, causes vapours fo rise from the water as dusky clouds when seen against the mountain and to interfere with the sun’s rays (the golden hair). Ultimately, they obscure the sun, forming above into white cumulus clouds (transformation of the maiden into the dove). This process has continued a week, and has been accompanied by frost (struggle of the young king with his enemies). At the end of that time the frost ceases, but the sky still remains overcast, until finally the warm teeming earth disperses the white cumulus clouds, and the sun again leaps forth.

So specialized a phenomenon, particularly as to time (just seven days) seems to point to the primitive legend having been framed in some very definite and circumscribed locality, with an extremely cold upper stratum of atmosphere.

Let us now turn to the internal evidence of the Slovenian legend, which indicates pretty clearly whereabouts that region lay. And first let us take stock, so to say, of our acquired knowledge in the matter. First, from and L’omo morto we know that the whole period of the primitive myth was one year, three months, one week, and a brief indefinite period after it.

From, and from George and his Goat, and other stories, we know that the three months are the three winter months presided over by Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces.

From George and his Goat, and from the Venetian form of The Three Citrons (L’amore delle Tre Narancie), we know that these three months were sometimes preluded by two or three of the last days of November, represented by George’s goat, Capricornus, symbolizing the first frosts after the misty weather of November. Now these three winter months count exactly ninety days, and this, be it said parenthetically, explains the prevalence of this number, which is a noteworthy feature of Siberian legends and others of high latitudes, but which disappears almost completely as the legends drift south. It may be laid down as a rule that the imagination of the people and of poets is much more matter-of-fact than learned people give it credit for, and that to produce a myth of the prodigious dimensions of the primitive annual solar fairy story we are here considering required a prodigious natural phenomenon. When the popular fancy declares that the sun disappeared into a black sea, that the hero wandered through pitchblack forests, or that there was a kingdom where the sun never shone, and that to make up for its absence the king of that country led a through it from