Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/546

514 BOOK the sleeper rests unawakcned until she feels the magic touch of the only being who can rouse her. With either of these ideas it was possible and easy to work out the myth into an infinite variety of detail ; and thus in the northern story Persephone becomes the maiden Brynhild who sleeps within the flaming walls, as the heroine of the Hindu tales lies in a palace of glass surrounded by seven hedges of spears. But she must sleep until the knight arrives who is to slay the dragon, and the successful exploit of Sigurd would suggest the failure of weaker men who had made the same attempt before him. Thus we have the germ of those countless tales in which the father promises to bestow his daughter on the man who can either leap over the wall of spears or work his way through the hedge of thorns, or slay the monster who guards her dwelling, death being the penalty for all who try and fail. The victorious knight is the sun when it has gained sufficient strength to break the chains of winter and set the maiden free ; the luckless beings who precede him are the suns which rise and set, making vain efforts in the first bleak days of spring to rouse nature from her deathlike slumbers. This is the simple tale of Dornroschen or Briar Rose, who pricks her finger with a spindle and falls into a sleep of a hundred years, the spindle answering here to the stupifying narcissus in the myth of Persephone. This sudden touch of winter, arresting all the life and activity of nature, followed in some climates by a return of spring scarcely less sudden, would naturally suggest the idea of human sleepers resuming their tasks at the precise point at which they were interrupted ; and thus when, after many princes who had died while trying to force their way through the hedge of briars, the king's son arrives at the end of the fated time and finds the way open, an air of burlesque is given to the tale (scarcely more extravagant, however, than that which Euripides has imparted to the deliverer of Alkestis), and the cook on his waking gives the scullion boy a blow which he had raised his hand to strike a hundred years ago.

This myth of the stealing away of the summer-child is told in Grimm's story of Rapunzel, where the witch's garden is the earth with its fertilising powers pent up within high walls. Rapunzel her- self is Kore, the maiden, the Rose of the Alhambra, while the witch is the icy Fredegonda, whose story Washington Irving has told with marvellous but unconscious fidelity. The maiden is shut up, like Danae, in a high tower, but the sequel reverses the Argive legend. It is not Zeus who comes in the form of a golden shower, but the prince who ascends on the long golden locks which stream to the earth from the head of Rapunzel. In the story of the Dwarfs Perse-

The story of Rapunzel.