Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/79

 theory of the Arctic origin of the eight stories be the true one, this is just what we should expect; on any other it is inexplicable. For the six weeks’ winter night on a given latitude is a definite period, not merely in theory, but in practice, and one that would indelibly stamp itself upon the primitive savage mind, with the dark misgivings of a perfectly reasonable terror—for there was to the people of those days no logical reason of any validity why the sun should re-appear after its winter death. Granted that within living memory and tradition it always had done so after a period of forty-two days, there was no logical proof whatever that it always would do so; it might be destined at no very distant period to set for ever and close for ever the sorry roll of earthly human existence, or to set for a period long enough to destroy all existing life upon the world and then fo reemerge and re-create a new era. We can only dimly realize with what passionate anxiety the more intelligent of the primitive inhabitants of the Arctic circle, under the constant shadow of this misgiving, would note the phases of the moon in that long night in order to establish the period of darkness, how light and dark moons would thus of necessity become the natural mode of reckoning time, how the moon would be everywhere hailed as par excellence the measurer and its light be looked upon as the water of life, the mystic Soma juice, the elixir of life, because it was the earnest and promise of the return of spring life and immortality, with the sun its mystic symbol in the heavens. So much for the winter night. The period after the solar resurrection down to the 1st of March was in a very different condition. It was in a certain sense an arbitrary period. It did not begin and end with the sharpness and definiteness of a newly-made grave. It was not a gap, a blank in the existing order of nature delved by some invisible hand, and always of exactly the same length, but merged gradually into the nightless summer day. And the partial thaws preluding the spring, and typified by the cleaving of the citrons, the apple tree, the well and the rose bush, were events which stubbornly refused to be submitted to any chronological law whatever, their occurrence varying with every varying year. Thus these eight primitive fairy stories in whose literary sculpture the Arctic winter mystery of death and regeneration is remodelled with such striking fidelity, have preserved at once the rigidity of death and the flexibility of life, synchronizing precisely where they remirror the definite period of Arctic winter death, diverging and divesting themselves of their mutual coherence where they allegorize the gradual return of spring, with its variously distributed thaws and partial relapses into winter frost and ice.