Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/88

 of all these stories, because fashioned upon the same block of the six weeks’ Arctic winter night, is again and again confirmed by different lines of reasoning. Lastly, as to the marriage of King Raven in October, it is to be observed that October in Slavonic is called rijenříjen [sic] or the rutting month, and also that in that month and in the second week in November occur St. Martin’s summer, and his little summer respectively. It may be considered too large and gratuitous an assumption to make that a fortnight corresponds to a year. Let us see. The whole character of the stories, Father Know-All and the Three Citrons, shews them to be more archaic than the moralized variants, such as Right remains Right and Fortune and Happiness. Now we know from George and his Goat, and a comparison between this and the other eight stories together, and with their Venetian variants, that the laughing of the prince or princess is an incident which allegorizes the first bright winter frost after the fogs and gloom of November; we also know from similar evidence that the hero and heroine were supposed to be born at the same date, and that this date was either the end of November or the beginning of December. In a late variant like Reason and Happiness, the stain, so to say, of the December-January Arctic winter night would have almost disappeared, and the heroine would be born at the beginning of December. Thus when the story says the heroine never spoke or laughed since the beginning of her twelfth year, this can only mean that nature was rendered dumb and gloomy by the fogs of November; that it was sad and cheerless without the laughter of the sunlight. Hence, if in two stories a year is found to correspond to a calendar month, and in another that it corresponds to a fortnight, we may safely infer that the origin of the latter was the more ancient, or, at any rate, that in this particular it had maintained the more ancient form, because it was only in very primitive times that the years were reckoned by light and dark moons, and not by calendar months. And it has been already pointed out that this method of reckoning most likely originated in the Arctic circle where, during the long winter night, the moon was of supreme importance as the measurer par excellence. There would also be another reason, the desire of symmetry and the tendency to synthesize and to endeavour to discover the whole remirrored in the part, characteristic of primitive thought. In Polar regions, and nowhere else, the system of reckoning by dark and light moons would satisfy this yearning, for the six microcosms of dark and light moons would reflect in miniature the year’s bi-fold divinity, its long summer day and long winter night, the cerny bog and bily bog, the black and white divinity of the primitive Polar Slavs or Finno-Slavs. Now a long time must have elapsed for the legend of the Miraculous Hair to detach itself from the anti-climax of the Three Citrons and develop into so different a variant. But the Miraculous Hair was certainly prior to Virgil’s account of the death of Dido in the fourth book of the Ænid, which was copied from it. Much older, therefore, than the time of Virgil was the story of the Three Citrons, and also, therefore, of its companion story the