the incidents which take place in the castle and at the bridge in the story of the Sun-horse.
In the adventures of the seer at the palace of the three kings we have an allegory of the indications of the coming break-up of the long winter Arctic night and the return of warmth and vitality upon the earth which rescue and bring back the sun. The reader will remember that the Three Fates in Father Know-All were dressed in white and carried tapers in their hands, the imagery being taken from the white world of snow with the stars shining above it. In the same way the three queens with their white hands represent the snow, and the witch mother-in-law is the cold or the darkness, the dragon or the black priest, or perhaps a sort of blending of the two. The green bird is the patches of green where the snow has melted owing to the ground-thaw, so often the prelude to the atmospheric thaw. When the witch exclaims, “Wring the bird’s neck, or it will dirty you yet,” it is only another way of saying: “If the thaw continue, the snow will become nothing but mud and slush.” In the palace of the seventh kingdom, then, we are given the indications of the coming thaw—Nature’s great vernal transformation-scene in circum-polar lands; at the bridge, which, as we know from Long, Broad, and and Sharp-Eyes, is the popular, poetical figure for the moment of sunset, we have the actual beginning of the transformation scene. All ardent skaters must be conscious with what anxiety they scan the weather at the moment of sunset, in order to divine whether their divine pastime will yet have a lease of life accorded to it, or is destined to expire with the morrow’s sun.
No doubt, in the same way, in circum-polar regions, the sunsets of the brief days after the first re-appearance of the sun after its winter sleep were scanned by our circum-polar ancestors with the same eagerness, in order to be able to conjecture whether or no the victory of vitality and light were at last in process of being secured. Did the puddles remain wet, or was a net-work of ice-spicules beginning to form over them? Did the dead-white sky veil itself rapidly in a cloak of darkness, or did the sunset burn low in lurid redness, or did a pellucid rose-tree rise transparent, like the shimmering vapour of a hot summer mid-day, suffusing itself through the limpid transparency of the western sky? It was a matter of very practical importance to those primitive ancestors of ours in their stuffy, uncomfortable, round winter pits, destitute of all or nearly all our modern luxuries, with the water that wouldn’t boil, or cooled as soon as boiled, no soap, and only flint scraping stones to shave with, quite as important, indeed, as it is nowadays to the modern skating enthusiast or tobogganer, or perhaps even more so.
Now in the three days’ contest at the bridge we have an admirable description of the last three days of a spell of winter weather. We have all the prognostications of the coming thaw in a poetical dress, and in the journey home a picture of the milder weather with the efforts of the frost “to take hold” again. Two popular weather saws (Sagas) inform us that in winter “Three white frosts and then a thaw,” and in summer, “Three fine days and then a thunderstorm,” is the usual sequence; and in both cases the weather intensifies from the first day to the third. The frost goes on doubling and doubling, and then bursts like the “enfant terrible” in Otesanek or Little Shaveling; the weather gets hotter and hotter, and people say: “Oh! this must end in a thunderstorm.” In the present instance we shall have two elements, therefore, tugging in opposite directions, so to say: the
