Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/95

 This substitution of a mother-in-law or step-mother occurs constantly where the story is not one of courtship. Observe that where the king is represented as inert, he has evil counsellors prejudiced against the hero and determined to ruin him, corresponding to the frost and ice-wind, or Loki, of the Scandinavian legends.

2. Frost-bound living Nature, in all but the story, is represented as the daughter of the king in (1). In two of the stories she is one of twelve maidens, and in she is dressed in white. She is therefore, in part, the last winter month enveloped in snow. Where not one of twelve, she is generally represented as under a spell. In the Sun-horse story alone is she represented by a Sun-horse, which is stolen by the mother-in-law and her three daughters and rescued from them by the seer. We are expressly told that when the sun had disappeared the king had this horse led through his kingdom from end to end, and that light streamed from it in all directions and saved the people from perishing. When the horse was lost everything was in darkness; it was only when the king had reached the adjoining kingdom in his search for the Sun-horse, that he saw the real sun just glimmering, as if through a mist. This, as has been shown in the notes to the Sun-horse, seems to be an allegory of the sun dimly seen through the fogs of November, and points to some region in the Arctic circle with abundant lakes or rivers as the source of the legend. The legend would then be the tradition of a year or period, when, owing to floods or some other reason, the fog was so thick that the sun was completely veiled. Note particularly the substitution of a horse for a young lady. This would lead one to expect to find traces of some primitive legend in which the heroine was herself on horseback.

3. Living Nature in waning autumn. This character is more or less subsidiary and faintly defined. In two stories he is a woodman, the woods above all showing plainly the year’s decay. In Reason and Happiness he is a peasant, perhaps an allusion to the Libusa and Premysl tradition. In one he is a shepherd; in two he is a superannuated old king; and in two the master of the hero. But in these two last (the Sun-horse and ), he merges more or less into the king, who represents winter-particularly in Golden Locks; a perfectly natural transformation to a people without almanacs, considering how variable the degree of cold is in autumn and winter respectively, during different autumn and winter seasons.

4. Aggressive life of Nature in returning re-opening spring. The hero. He is always the son or dependent of the last. In, the most primitive of the legends in form, he is called Plavachek (just as the Piave is the chief river in the Slav province of Venezia), the swimmer, a clear allusion to the river floods in autumn, and perhaps also after the breaking up of the ice in early spring. In two of the stories his name is Jiricek (? a diminutive of year), which name, corresponding in Czech to George, may be an