Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/83

and the tailor of Reason and Happiness. Thus in the Bethlehem legend we have the three kings of the Sun-horse put in the place of the three Norns of Father Know-All. In the comparative illustration the dark line at the top of it indicates the long Arctic winter night, where the primitive legend was first invented; and so profoundly did it affect the consciousness of our ancestors, that, like the traditional blood-stain which cannot be effaced, faint or distinet it has remained within the web and woof of these eight primitive Slavonic fairy stories, and can be more or less clearly traced in all of them. There is, in fact, in all of them, a strange material kind of inertia. Just as the Noah’s Ark or cloud-wrack persists identical in form through the long winter’s night, and maintains its contours until the last flicker of white fleece melts away into the transparent ether, just as every vibration of the tide’s waves are mirrored in the sand pictures of the sand and coal dust in the Durham Sands, just as the cloud-line follows the mountain, just as the gyroscope retains the inclination given to it, just as the expression of face in a pencil sketch cannot wholly be got rid by any amount of after-altering of the lines which form the features, so in the first half of these stories the sun’s six weeks’ sojourn in the underworld of Arctic winter life has printed itself indelibly upon all of them. One of the most curious instances of this “inertia” is perhaps to be found in the Venetian story—in every respect modern—of a holiday dinner. As we shall see, the cat jumps into a spider’s web, her tail hangs down, and the dog Jumps at the tail, the wife at the dog, the husband at the wife, and they are all hung up together. Now this is George and His Goat over again: the goat is the old woman of the Tre narance, she is the old woman of the Three Citrons, who corresponds to the Norns of Father Know-All, the third of whom is found by the hero, spiderlike, spinning in a corner of the deserted castle of gold.

 

---