Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/72

 lengthening days and the strengthening power of the sun, the strengthening frost and the shortening nights, or three to one against the frost-kings. For let us assume the three kings to be the frost, riding home at sunset, then we see at once why the encounters became more difficult each night; the story also gives us a clear hint of the lengthening of the days when it says “the youngest king sped fast, for he had been delayed somewhat.” The horror of the frost-kings at bloodshed is intelligible enough, anything fluid being contrary to their very existence and abhorrent to their whole régime. The pool of blood is evidently the pool of unfrozen water in which the lurid red of the sunset is reflected. The cart-wheel which smashes the lighter wheel is the disc of the sun, supplanting the disc of the moon that had been omnipotent in the long winter night; the red flame conquering the pale flame is the light of the sunset and the sunrise gradually crowding out the moonlight; the old beggar man is the Annual Destiny or Fate sprinkling with dew the dying moon at the triumph of the dawn. The witch catching up her daughters and flying with them into the air is the evaporation of the snow, which, by cooling the air occasionally at the end of a long spell of winter weather, galvanizes the frost into a last effort, and effects brief temporary arrests of the triumph of returning spring. The apple tree, the well, and the rose tree symbolize three such brief arrests, and the blood of the three queens is the surface-water produced by the melting of the snow in contradistinction to the genuine streams and rivers. And lastly, the Sun-horse, with the sun on its forehead, which at the beginning of the story in November was but a substitute for the sun, faintly glimmering through autumnal mist and fog, has now become the sun itself, returning triumphant in the triumph of a re-awakening and unclouded spring.