Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/78



plan of the second half of the is a necessary deduction from comparing the,  and the Three Citrons with the corresponding and later variants in Bernoni’s Venetian folk-lore. The merit of the great Venetian folk-lorist’s work is that it is an absolutely plain unvarnished tale, every syllable of which has been taken down direct from the mouths of the common people; it is, therefore, absolutely to be relied upon. Now before reading his work, I deduced from internal evidence that the period of Father Know-All was a year and three months. Now in that most precious relic, the Venetian story L’omo morto (the dead man), we find this deduction confirmed with certainty, for the heroine is invited to watch a year and three months and a week by the bedside of the dead man. And this story is a variant of the anti-climax of the Three Citrons, and allows us to infer with certainty that the incident of the war and the bewitching of the queen occupied exactly seven days. Again, in the variant of the whole story of the Three Citrons, in the Venetian L’amore delle tre narance that is to say, the one discrepancy between the Sun-horse and the Three Citrons does not occur, the third citron being cleft before the arrival at the castle home of the hero (see plan). And this discrepancy in the two forms of the Three Citrons is easily explained by the uncertainty whether in the return journey the three last days of November ought or ought not to be counted in. On the one hand, the law of symmetry requires that they should be; on the other hand, that they should not, in order that the marriage and betrothal month should exactly tally with February, the month when the birds pair. It follows from this that the Sun-horse is a fragmentary story, and closely related to the Three Citrons. Again, is simply a later variant of Father Know-All. We have thus established for four of the eight stories the period of a year, three months, a week, and a brief indefinite period, that is to say, in their primitive form. Again, all eight stories in their period from the first disappearance to the first re-appearance of the sun after its Arctic winter death exactly tally and synchronize. On the other hand, as we shall see, it is next to impossible to draw a comparative illustration to scale in which the events of the second half of the eight stories can be made to synchronize. To quote the most obvious instance: in Father Know-All the three days’ struggle to recover the sunlight occurs in the castle of gold, and is omitted in Right remains Right; in the other stories it occurs as a twelve hours’ journey from the castle or its equivalent. And the further we travel from the first half of the stories the greater become the discrepancies. Now if the