Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/84

 this second illustration, drawn as far as possible to scale, and representing the second half of the eight primitive annual solar fairy stories, be compared with the previous illustration, the symmetry of the one and the irregularity of the other cannot fail to strike the reader’s imagination. The first is symmetrical because it represents the conventional myth fashioned, so to say, upon the rigid un- changing block of the six weeks’ journey of the sun through the Arctic winter night from its first disappearance on the 1st December to its re-appearance forty-two days later in January. The second is irregular because the partial thaws and spells of warm weather, heralding the return of spring, are differently distributed in different years, and the final break-up of the reign of winter is also very variable in date. The only event which is of constant occurrence in this second half of the eight fairy stories, is the three days’ struggle for the light, and even this is absent in, that story being a degraded and moralized version of Father Know-All, in which the rape of the three hairs occurs within the castle of gold instead of a twelve hours’ journey beyond it. There is a certain correspondence—more apparent, however, than real—in the incident of the well; but in general the distribution of the incidents is so different in each of the eight stories as to form the strongest possible contrast with the mathematical regularity of the first group, which were capable of being exactly drawn to scale. Now the primitive annual solar fairy story’s period may be compared to a ribbon a little more than sixty-one inches in length, this length being constant to represent the one year, three months, one week, and a few days deduced roughly from Father Know-All, and confirmed by the Venetian variant of the end of the Three Citrons—L’omo morto (the dead man)—and we must imagine this ribbon pinned down for just six inches to represent the definite six weeks’ period of the Arctic winter night which gave rise to the myth. Hence, if a variant does not quite reach to the end of the period—the second week in March, and yet is to represent the whole of the year, three months, one week, and a few days, it will have to begin a little earlier, in other words, what is cut off one end of the ribbon will have to be added on to the other. Now Father Know-All is the only one of the eight myths which covers all, or nearly the whole of the period, and the end of it does not exactly tally with that of the Three Citrons, so that it is not wonderful if it begins a week or two earlier than the Three Citrons would have done if it had been complete, that is to say, if it had preserved its prologue or rapid sketch of the year previous to the prince’s wandering through the forty-two days of the Arctic winter night. Consequently, in drawing the following diagram, which forms a rough plan of the primitive annual myth, it has been necessary to extend 1t rather beyond the exact limit of sixty-one equal spaces and a fraction, because the internal evidence of Father Know-All points to the birth of Plavachek having been imagined to occur about the middle of November instead of at the end of it, though it is not absolutely necessary to make this assumption. In any case absolute identity of parts and relation of parts in eight elaborate annual solar weather myths of great antiquity is hardly to be expected.