NOTE.
From the conclusion of the Three Citrons it was inferred that the primitive epic fairy story was hatched within the Arctic circle at some point where there are numerous lakes or rivers, or both. The Sun-horse tends to confirm this theory. Let the reader turn to the plan of the two stories, and he will see that, assuming, the six kingdoms traversed by the seer and servant in search of the Sun-horse to be so many weeks, they exactly tally with the journey of the young prince from the first meeting with the ravens to the departure from the castle of silver, a period of forty-two days. And, assuming this coincidence, the other elements also exactly coincide. It follows, therefore, that the first kingdom—that one, namely, in which the divine sun never shone—is also a period of time. It therefore coincides with November, of which, in fact, it is a perfectly natural and obvious allegory. The disappearance of the Sun-horse seems to allegorize a year when the fog was so thick that the sun disappeared for awhile altogether: that is to say, the legend, belongs to some region intersected with lakes or canals to supply vapour enough to produce such a phenomenon in an Arctic, and therefore smokeless, part of the world. The arrival of the king at the limits of his kingdom where the sun peeps, through dense fogs, will thus correspond to the Manka, Doodle and Kate incident in George and his Goat, and the end of the three first days’ travelling of the young prince in the Three Citrons, that is, to the end of the first three days’ winter frost, at the end of November.
We have already seen that Father Know-All represents the original epic fairy story with the incidents fairly distributed over it, the only part which is missing being the last week’s epilogue or anti-climax, followed by a brief indeterminate period of a few days.
The stories we have been considering are all varied from the primitive type by the omission of part of the period, or the excessive elaboration of one or two of its elements. Thus, while Father Know-All corresponds in form to the epic poem, Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes is the prototype of our three-volume novel. The Three Citrons of the three-volume novel with an anti-climax of the Lorna Doone type; in both of these stories the three months’ winter period being excessively elaborated; in the former, indeed, the last three days’ struggle to get back the sun is the pièce de résistance, while in the latter the journey through the forty-two sunless days is the appetizing morsel. In reading other fairy stories and legends with intelligence, it will be perceived that all the more celebrated ones—those, that is to say, most widely diffused—obey the same law. Either we have abridgments of the whole primitive epic, or condensation of one part or parts, combined with the expansion of others, or the isolation of one of the elements and its special elaboration. In the more purely local stories the disintegration may have gone further, and some single incident be that from which the story is evolved, and the only link connecting it with its proper section of the primitive myth. To make this clearer, I will give two instances of local fairy stories in which the connecting link has almost disappeared. The first is a Venetian one called La Merda, which is an allegory of the rise of Venice from the slime and mud of the Lagoons.
