NOTE.
This story occurs in Venetian Slav folk-lore as the Basket of Flowers. We have already shewn reason to believe that the Venetian folk-lore stories have travelled from East-Central Europe south, and not from Venice north. The story in its Venetian dress confirms this hypothesis. We shall see later on that George’s Goat is Capricornus. With its transformation into a basket, and the disappearance of the three mates corresponding to Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes, as well as the bull and the mayor, the story almost entirely loses its character of an annual myth. Like the transformation of the pike in the Polish story into an eel in the Venetian one, and of the horse punishment of Slav stories into the punishment of being burnt on a tar barrel in the Venetian ones, the transformation of Capricornus into a basket of flowers is just what we might expect if the story was transplanted from rigorous Central Europe to the lagoons of Venice, and its character of an annual myth became thus obliterated. The loss of the three mates and the transformation of the mayor and the bull into other characters is particularly significant, for, as will be shewn further on (see supplementary essay), Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes are the three signs of the Zodiac, Sagittarius, Aquarius, and Pisces, and the mayor and the bull in all probability the sun and Taurus. In the Venetian variant, instead of George we have an old man, instead of the mayor a bell-ringer with a bunch of grapes, instead of the bull a baker’s boy, a wayfarer and a flock of geese. But the transformation of the goat into a basket is the most instructive of all, for it tells us a lot of things, and shows in actual operation the mechanism, partly linguistic, partly local, partly racial, by which the characters of myths and fairy-stories change their form with Protean facility. If there is one characteristic more marked than another in the Venetian dialect, and therefore in the speech organs of the race that speaks it at present, it is the softening of the harsh s into the soft z. Now there are two words in Czech—koza, a she-goat, and kosh, a basket. The former word, it might be remarked in parenthesis, gives us the famous Slav Cossacks, properly goat-herds. Supposing a people in Venice and the neighbouring lagoons who spoke, or at all events understood Slavonic, and the absence of that mountain animal, the goat, among swamps and rushes, the two words koza and kosh, being both pronounced with the terminal consonant as soft z, would easily be confused and interchanged; and the basket, being more appropriate to that rushy region than the goat, would soon take its place. We may thus infer, with some probability, that the story was transplanted to Venice, or at all events to the adjacent fens, at a period when the people inhabiting Venice or those fens still spoke Slavonic. That such a period existed in the perhaps not very distant past is also rendered highly probable from the fact that all the principal place-names of the region, and indeed those of a great part of the province of Venetia, can be perfectly accounted for as Latinized Slav words.
