Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/70

 the legend would gradually modify itself to suit a less rigorous winter and other changed climatic conditions, and perhaps this may have been partly the case with Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes; nevertheless, in all four of the above-cited fairy stories it is perfectly possible to interpret the incidents, without forcing them, as Arctic winter ones, while in Father Know-All and the Three Citrons it is the only satisfactory interpretation. Let us look a little more closely at the event as elaborated in the Sun-horse. But before doing so let us try and put ourselves into the mental position of our savage circumpolar ancestors. At present, enlightened by science, we refer all the vital phenomena of the surface of our globe to the heat of the sun. But the instinct of savage people is just the other way. There is with them a complete inversion of cause and effect. It is not (see ) the sun that creates mankind, but mankind that creates the sun. It is not the sun that brings back the spring, but the gathering vital forces of nature that conjure back the sun. And if this habit of mind, still prevalent among religious folk whose superstitions represent the dying cosmical blunders of primitive barbarism, is still powerful enough to cause hundreds of thousands of Christians to believe that by prayer they can conjure the climatic effects dependent upon the movements of cyclones and anti-cyclones, or thereby change the course of epidemics or their own lives and conduct, it is not wonderful if savages within the Arctic circle, with few or no means of accurate observation and scanty stores of accumulated knowledge, mistook cause for effect, and imagined it was the cold which killed the sun and not the sun which killed the cold. In fact, it is probable that with the scanty accumulated knowledge and means of observation of those times, our first men of science would have come to pretty much the same conclusion. The sun being imagined as at all events not so very far away from the earth, the cold that affected the earth would naturally be supposed, when it was extreme, also to extend itself to the upper sun-heaven. Now it would be matter of constant observation that as things lost their heat they lost their mobility and buoyancy, that as the fire smouldered out its flames leapt less high, that as the water cooled its vapour ceases to rise, that when it congealed to ice all movement was checked. Again, it would be also recognized that if the sun was not the primary source of heat, it was all events a sort of reservoir or point of condensation of terrestrial warmth, and that, as this last declined, the sun had less vis viva to perform its diurnal revolution, until at last, growing weaker and weaker pari passu with the increasing rigour of the frost, it had hardly force left to raise itself a few degrees above the horizon. At last it died, the cold had killed it, it disappeared into the maw of Fenris the wolf; the golden apple, frost-bitten like any other apple, had fallen into the subterranean apple garth; all that remained to hope for was that the deity, prime source of the vigorous, sensual northern vitality, would have vital force enough to revivify the old sun or to create another one. In order to do this, in order to resuscitate the sun, to recover the Sun-horse, what was required was for the vital forces of nature to combat and conquer the long winter frost and lifelessness. And seeing that man was conscious above all things in himself of that general vitality, the notion of the seer or hero who performed the miracle became something more than a mere metaphor, it hovered between allegory and reality, like the faiths, hopes, and superstitions of our own modern religious world. If the reader has followed these preliminary observations, he will see how perfectly natural and easy is the explanation of