Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/82



preceding plate is a comparative illustration of the first half o the eight fairy stories, and shows to demonstration that they are all variants of one and the same primitive myth, the origin of which was the long winter night of the Arctic circle. The drawings are not fancy ones, they are simply plotted down from the stories. Truly astonishing is the absolute uniformity in segments seven, with the exception of the story of, the most confused of any of the stories. In all the rest we have the termination of a black forest or of the night spent in a black forest, or of journeying through kingdoms of darkness. In all these again we have a castle of gold with the figure of an old woman outside it, or some obvious variation to represent the re-appearance of the sun after the onglong [sic] Arctic winter night, either a castle of gold or a castle where a green bird perches on the three queens’ snow-white hands, obviously the patches of green which appear at the melting of the snow; or a well which gives sight to the blind, or a lake with a gold fish in it, or a cleft rock with a gold nugget extracted from it, or a doll given the golden gift of speech and life. In George and His Goat we have an illustration of how in later variants the symbolical characters became mixed and interchanged. We know from the Venetian variant of the, Le tre narance, as well as from Il qestelo di fiori, that George’s goat properly signifies Capricornus, and that the incident of making the princess laugh belongs properly to the beginning of the winter fairy romance. But in this story the events occurring in the black forest being hastily sketched in, the first frosts at the end of November have become linked with the return of light in spring, a combination all the more easy to be made from the facility with which the goat Capricornus was confounded with Aries; thus we can explain the mayor looking out of the window, and the bull aflterwards brushing past and attaching itself to him, as the sun passing into the constellation of the bull in spring. The same is more or less true of the three mates in ; they are in part the long moonless night of the Arctic winter, its broad moonlight, and the returning sunlight after the dark period, in part the last autumn and two winter signs of the zodiac; and Broad is perhaps, besides this, a symbol of the autumn or spring floods, or perhaps both. We shall see soon how pre-eminently synthetic the speculation of primitive times was; this transformation and transposition of the symbolical characters is not, consequently, due to confusion of thought, but to a desire to establish recondite analogies between the part and the whole, to find the impress of the whole year in its microcosm, and of this in its six weeks’ sunless period. Thus in the Moravian story of the Four Brothers, the four seasons are symbolized by personages closely resembling Long, Sharp-Eyes,