Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/93



table is an attempt to classify the characters of these eight stories. It will be seen that nearly all the characters are the same in the eight stories, and that they can easily be referred to the natural events they allegorize. Just as in biology the simple forms precede the more differentiated chronologically, so, in a general way, the story which most closely allegorizes the death of the year and the renewal of spring will be the most ancient. Those stories in which some of the characters have become rudimentary, or have disappeared, in which new characters have been added or the original ones differentiated into two, three, or more, will be the more modern ones. That this principle is a sound one is borne out by the fact that the two stories most differentiated are those to which a moral is tacked on, viz., and. In a moral idea also glimmers: George declares that the king ought to keep his promise, for saying which the wicked counsellor declares his life to be forfeit. In this story the characters have greatly changed in form. Jezibaba has become a goat, not an inappropriate change. The sun has become the mayor looking out of the window. Four new characters, a landlord and his three daughters, Manka, Doodle and Kate (perhaps corresponding to the baker and his three daughters in Rè Corvo), have been added, not to mention a unicorn and two beasts. In Reason and Happiness, Charon and the sun have both disappeared. The father of the heroine has differentiated into a perfectly inert king, a cruel counsellor and the executioner, that is, inert winter-the icy wind and the frost which nips the nose off two of the heroes in a story called “Are you Angry?”; not to mention the farmer’s wife who cuts the mice’s tails off in the catch of “Three Blind Mice.” Jezibaba has differentiated into Reason and Good-Luck, and the Fates dwindled into a carver and tailor (mentioned incidentally), and have to be eked out by the hero himself, who forms a third. In Right remains Right, the Fates and the sun have both disappeared. Jezibaba plays a very subsidiary part as the old woman who points out the sight-restoring well; and Charon has developed into three damned spirits, the souls of three executed murderers.

Let us now pass in review the eight allegorical figures and examine them more closely.

1. Dead winter, in all eight stories, is represented by a king who is either inert or harsh and stubborn, with the exception of one, the, where he has been replaced by the witch mother-in-law.