of radiating centre for much more ancient legends and myths to crystallize around.
We have seen in Father Know-All that the Prelude occupies a period of a year from the 1st of December to the 1st of December. Naturally, therefore, the events are sketched in but slightly. The childhood of Plavachek, for example, is passed over without comment, because, occupying the same period as the great winter romance, it would only be a feeble, infantile anticipation of it. This period, however, being left indefinite, has been seized hold of by popular fancy to burlesque the great winter romance; hence we have a crop of stories of the Red Riding Hood type, in which a wolf or an overgrown baby eats up all the characters and then splits open, and all the characters march out again. El Galo, the cock (Venetian), Le tre ochete (the three goslings), also Venetian, Otesanek (Little Shaveling, Czech), Budulinek (Moravian: buda is connected with the word “booth”), Red Riding Hood, the Finding of Moses in the Rushes (so appropriately parodied in the frontispiece to Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad”), are one or two types of this large group of popular burlesqued annual solar myths. Speaking generally, it may be said that the first incident in Father Know-All has given us the group of miraculous birth legends of the Bethlehem and Three Magi (Christian), or The Godmother death type (Moravian, but found in a degraded form in Italy as Crispino e la Comare). The saving of Plavachek has given us the popular burlesques of which the Finding of Moses and Little Red Riding Hood are types. The journey of the prince and the struggle for the three hairs gives the bulk of the popular fairy stories which differ according as the journey or the struggle is the most elaborated; in the Three Citrons the journey, in the Sun-horse the struggle, is the part most carefully worked out. The struggle for the three hairs isolated has perhaps, on drifting south, transformed into the midsummer fairy stories of which Jezinky and the Wood Woman (Czech) are among the most beautiful instances. Lastly, the week’s epilogue, tag, or anti-climax has given us the great group of Lorely and Miraculous Hair legends. Nor is this, perhaps, all. This or that segment of the primitive myth having produced a whole group of variants, the details of these new stories have been transformed and grafted, so to say, upon members of the other groups; language, latitude, and climate, as the stories drifted southward or to and fro, have helped to modify them, and thus the precious heirloom of folk-lore and popular legend, as we possess it at the present day, has been gradually compounded from the disintegration of the primitive rock.
A glance at the plan, and a rapid mental résumé of the Sun-horse, and we see that the whole bulk of the story consists of a development of the incident of the three hairs in Father Know-All, of the three days and nights in the enchanted castle of Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes, and of the castle of gold and the hill of glass in the Three Citrons. The Sun-horse, in this part of it, is nearest to the Three Citrons; the three days’ struggle at the return of the sun from its winter underworld causes a twofold set of events, the first in the castle or palace where information is obtained as to the whereabouts of the hill of glass in the former, and of the three kings in the latter case, but it is more highly elaborated. I have said that the rape of the three hairs in Father Know-All can only be explained as an Arctic allegory of the first days of the sun’s return, when it only appears for so short a time above the horizon that it may be said just to wake and go to sleep again during a single long night. No doubt as the myth drifted south this part of
