Segnius Irritant: or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories/Explanation of plan

by Walter William Strickland

Complete plan of the second half of the Sun-Horse, showing the close relationship between the two stories.						Complete plan of the second half of the Three Citrons.
Journey to Bridge.			January	19th	Journey to Hill of Glass
Three days struggle at the bridge	$\scriptstyle {\left\{{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right.}$		January„	20th	$\scriptstyle {\left.{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right\}\,}$	Gathering of Three Citrons
			January„	21st
			January„	22nd
			January„	23rd
The apple tree			January„	24th
			January„	25th	Cleaving of 1st Citron.
			January„	26th
			January„	27th
The well			January„	28th	Cleaving of 2nd Citron.
			January„	29th
			January„	30th
The rose			January„	31st
			February	11st	Arrival home: Cleaving of 3rd Citron: Betrothal and marriage of hero, and death of old king.
Boundary of the Sun-Horse Kingdom.			February„	12nd
			February„	13rd
			February„	14th
			February„	15th
			February„	16th
			February„	17th
			February„	18th
			February„	19th
			February„	10th
			February„	11th
			February„	12th
			February„	13th
			February„	14th
			February„	15th
			February„	16th
			February„	17th
			February„	18th
			February„	19th
			February„	20th
			February„	21st
			February„	22nd
			February„	23rd
			February„	24th
			February„	25th
			February„	26th
			February„	27th
			February„	28th
					War of young king with neighbouring kings. Bewitching of queen and transformation into a dove.
			Time Indefinite.		Return of young king from the war. Disenchanting of queen, and burning of the witch and gipsy.

 

EXPLANATION OF PLAN.

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This plan of the second half of the Three Citrons is a necessary deduction from comparing the Sun-horse, Father Know-All and the Three Citrons with the corresponding and later variants in Bernoni’s Venetian folk-lore. The merit of the great Venetian folk-lorist’s work is that it is an absolutely plain unvarnished tale, every syllable of which has been taken down direct from the mouths of the common people; it is, therefore, absolutely to be relied upon. Now before reading his work, I deduced from internal evidence that the period of Father Know-All was a year and three months. Now in that most precious relic, the Venetian story L’omo morto (the dead man), we find this deduction confirmed with certainty, for the heroine is invited to watch a year and three months and a week by the bedside of the dead man. And this story is a variant of the anti-climax of the Three Citrons, and allows us to infer with certainty that the incident of the war and the bewitching of the queen occupied exactly seven days. Again, in the variant of the whole story of the Three Citrons, in the Venetian L’amore delle tre narance that is to say, the one discrepancy between the Sun-horse and the Three Citrons does not occur, the third citron being cleft before the arrival at the castle home of the hero (see plan). And this discrepancy in the two forms of the Three Citrons is easily explained by the uncertainty whether in the return journey the three last days of November ought or ought not to be counted in. On the one hand, the law of symmetry requires that they should be; on the other hand, that they should not, in order that the marriage and betrothal month should exactly tally with February, the month when the birds pair. It follows from this that the Sun-horse is a fragmentary story, and closely related to the Three Citrons. Again, Right remains Right is simply a later variant of Father Know-All. We have thus established for four of the eight stories the period of a year, three months, a week, and a brief indefinite period, that is to say, in their primitive form. Again, all eight stories in their period from the first disappearance to the first re-appearance of the sun after its Arctic winter death exactly tally and synchronize. On the other hand, as we shall see, it is next to impossible to draw a comparative illustration to scale in which the events of the second half of the eight stories can be made to synchronize. To quote the most obvious instance: in Father Know-All the three days’ struggle to recover the sunlight occurs in the castle of gold, and is omitted in Right remains Right; in the other stories it occurs as a twelve hours’ journey from the castle or its equivalent. And the further we travel from the first half of the stories the greater become the discrepancies. Now if the theory of the Arctic origin of the eight stories be the true one, this is just what we should expect; on any other it is inexplicable. For the six weeks’ winter night on a given latitude is a definite period, not merely in theory, but in practice, and one that would indelibly stamp itself upon the primitive savage mind, with the dark misgivings of a perfectly reasonable terror—for there was to the people of those days no logical reason of any validity why the sun should re-appear after its winter death. Granted that within living memory and tradition it always had done so after a period of forty-two days, there was no logical proof whatever that it always would do so; it might be destined at no very distant period to set for ever and close for ever the sorry roll of earthly human existence, or to set for a period long enough to destroy all existing life upon the world and then fo reemerge and re-create a new era. We can only dimly realize with what passionate anxiety the more intelligent of the primitive inhabitants of the Arctic circle, under the constant shadow of this misgiving, would note the phases of the moon in that long night in order to establish the period of darkness, how light and dark moons would thus of necessity become the natural mode of reckoning time, how the moon would be everywhere hailed as par excellence the measurer and its light be looked upon as the water of life, the mystic Soma juice, the elixir of life, because it was the earnest and promise of the return of spring life and immortality, with the sun its mystic symbol in the heavens. So much for the winter night. The period after the solar resurrection down to the 1st of March was in a very different condition. It was in a certain sense an arbitrary period. It did not begin and end with the sharpness and definiteness of a newly-made grave. It was not a gap, a blank in the existing order of nature delved by some invisible hand, and always of exactly the same length, but merged gradually into the nightless summer day. And the partial thaws preluding the spring, and typified by the cleaving of the citrons, the apple tree, the well and the rose bush, were events which stubbornly refused to be submitted to any chronological law whatever, their occurrence varying with every varying year. Thus these eight primitive fairy stories in whose literary sculpture the Arctic winter mystery of death and regeneration is remodelled with such striking fidelity, have preserved at once the rigidity of death and the flexibility of life, synchronizing precisely where they remirror the definite period of Arctic winter death, diverging and divesting themselves of their mutual coherence where they allegorize the gradual return of spring, with its variously distributed thaws and partial relapses into winter frost and ice.

 

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