mirk-god) to become mirk, i.e., the day curdling into night; smrsknouti, to wrinkle; smrstiti, the same; and smrst, an elephant’s trunk; smrt, death; umriti, to die; and numerous derivatives from both these words. Death therefore being evidently so closely linked with cold, wrinkling and congelation, and fate with death (cf. the Moravian story of Godmother Death), no wonder if Jezibaba now and then plays the part. And if there were any doubt about this it would be set at rest by the story of the Three Citrons.
The old woman who persuades the young prince to go in search of the citrons is the first winter frost after the fogs of November; she who makes the young prince laugh in the Love of the Three Oranges (Venetian) by tumbling into the oil-well. But she is also Destiny, for, arrived at the Hill of Glass, the prince exclaims: Porucena Bohu! uz ak buďe tak buďe! che sarà, sarà (Honoured be God! what will be will be). And in a special sense is the cold of the first winter frost at the beginning of the hero’s adventures, a reapparition of the Fates, who appeared just a year before at the same date round his cradle when he was born; because just as fate leads human life irresistibly to the grave, so did the first winter frost infallibly prelude the grave’s Arctic prototype, the long winter night, in which the darkness was not all an evil; for to our sensual Ugrian ancestors it was a period of unbridled licence and sensuality—the earthly Soma juice, the elixir of life, the physical, material, bodily delight, corresponding on earth to the moonlight in heaven, which together rendered that darkness anything but unendurable. Thus the people that walked in darkness saw a great light; thus to the annual winter death of Polar regions, enshrining in its sunless gloom the silver casket of an utterly abandoned sensuality, we owe the beautiful but alas! unproven superstition, that the light of love still gilds the tomb, just as it silvered the long Arctic winter night to our lusty Hungarian ancestors. We can now, step by step, shew that the Norns and the basket in Il çestelo di fiori (Venetian) are, incredible as it may seem, one and the same person. For Jezibaba, the old woman at the beginning of the Three Citrons, is a re-embodiment of the Three Fates in the prelude to Father Know-All. This old woman is the same as the one at the beginning of the Venetian variant of the story (L’amore delle tre narance), who makes the prince laugh by falling into the oil-well. The old woman who falls into the oil-well is the same as George’s goat in the Czech story, who makes the princess laugh; and a mistaken derivation of the word koza, combined with the Venetian lagoons, has turned the goat into a basket. The transformation has even gone a step further in an absurd Venetian variant called A Holiday Dinner. A woman leaves the dinner cooking. The cat and dog eat it. Then, afraid of a whipping, the cat jumps into a spider’s web (note, the basket of flowers has become an autumn spinner’s web—the spider of St. Martin’s summers), but her tail hangs down. The dog jumps at the tail and sticks to it. The wife, returning from mass, and then her husband share the same fate, and are also hung up. Their crony
