Walter William Strickland

“ After this, the monster of religious arrogance grew beyond all bounds, the poisonous seed which would never have had a chance amongst a primitive and healthy people living in the open air, throve apace on the hot-bed of the expiring classic world which the toadstools of superstition converted little by little into the fetid ichor and gaudy corruption, covered by the long dark autumnal and winter night of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Thus these eight primitive fairy stories in whose literary sculpture the Arctic winter mystery of death and regeneration is remodelled with such striking fidelity, have preserved at once the rigidity of death and the flexibility of life, synchronizing precisely where they remirror the definite period of Arctic winter death, diverging and divesting themselves of their mutual coherence where they allegorize the gradual return of spring, with its variously distributed thaws and partial relapses into winter frost and ice. ”

“ So Blasius won the day, at least, he
Appeared to win, but soon his outlines
And his Achates, too, grow misty
Far down stream, and the night of doubt lines
The hollow vale, and hangs its pall
O’er mountain shrine, o’er echoing hall,
O’er whited kirk, o’er fretted altar,
O’er chanted rhymes, o’er periods rounded,
O’er creeds that fail, o’er faiths that falter,
All mouldering, in one white ring bounded,
Dim as the shadowy streams that pen
The pale, wan ghosts that once were men ”

“ Those who have walked over a plain or table-land thickly covered with snow on a starry winter’s night, know how intensely the mind is besieged by the idea of fate and fatality. This is the feeling or idea which has dressed the fates in white, with tapers in their hands. Interwoven in these stories to the inmost core is the presence of snow and ice. Carried to a warmer climate they may have melted into Indra myths and the like no Indra myth could ever have frozen into the Norns of Father Know-All. ”

“ Now if the theory of the Arctic origin of the eight stories be the true one, this is just what we should expect; on any other it is inexplicable. For the six weeks’ winter night on a given latitude is a definite period, not merely in theory, but in practice, and one that would indelibly stamp itself upon the primitive savage mind, with the dark misgivings of a perfectly reasonable terror—for there was to the people of those days no logical reason of any validity why the sun should re-appear after its winter death. ”

“ Human conduct must somehow certainly be all-important, and if faith was useless from an engineering point of view, it must be all the more effective in the moral and spiritual world, determining the condition of the individual soul after death and for all eternity. Thus religious vanity has managed, by hook or by crook, to save its bacon, and to this day our religious world bears witness to and perpetuates, in a slightly modified form, the grotesque delusions, more pardonable in them from their want of our accumulated stores of knowledge of our savage ancestry. ”

“ Itself, to show the sceptic scoffers
Who mock humanity’s weak sides
How subtly interest divides
The bands of hate; what vice exacts
Self-love or avarice counteracts;
How passions timely yield to reason’s
Mild influence or the change of seasons;
How nature’s nail now this whim stopping,
Now that, keeps all the cat-gut hopping,
Expectant lifted high, now sinking
Despairing, swearing, hoodwinking, drinking,
Protesting, resting, declaiming, blaming,
Now cutting short its own existence,
Its neighbour’s now, with the assistance
Of slugs and seconds, swords and scandals ”

“ In order to do this, in order to resuscitate the sun, to recover the Sun-horse, what was required was for the vital forces of nature to combat and conquer the long winter frost and lifelessness. And seeing that man was conscious above all things in himself of that general vitality, the notion of the seer or hero who performed the miracle became something more than a mere metaphor, it hovered between allegory and reality, like the faiths, hopes, and superstitions of our own modern religious world. ”

“ For that was the gigantic delusion to which he sacrificed his life. If it were not so tragical, we, with our present knowledge of the vastness of the universe and our own insignificance, should be inclined to smile at the ludicrous want of a sense of proportion between the means and the end that such an idea displayed, and no doubt no Greek philosopher or even Greek lyric poet, with their instinctive sense of proportion and harmony, could ever have been betrayed into so glaring and fatal an error ”

“ Meanwhile, in the castle, the king’s son was in great anxiety. The sun’s beam began to show itself from behind the two mountains and the servants still returned not; and the more fiercely the rays mounted on high, the greater grew his distress. A deadly sweat started to his forehead. Then soon the sun appeared in the east like a thin glowing stripe, and at that moment the doors flew open with a tremendous bang, and on the threshold stood Black-Prince, and, seeing no signs of the queen, chuckled horribly and stepped into the apartment. ”

“ In the Venetian variant a trace of the bean stalk remains in the dish of scarlet runners, and as the scarlet runner is a symbol-of the moon, this proves that the castle of the wind and the castle of lead really do, as was before inferred, represent the dark moon. The dumplings of the Slovenian legend have been transformed, the lead ones into a chestnut, the silver ones into a walnut, and the gold ones into an apple, the invariable high latitude symbol of the sun. ”

“ The third evening, just at the set of the sun, sped the youngest king on the Sun-horse, sped fast, for he had been delayed somewhat; but as a pool of blood crimsoned the ground before the bridge, he halted, and observing it, exclaimed: It has been some unheard-of criminal who has dared to kill a man in my kingdom.” Scarcely had these words escaped his lips when the seer posted himself before him with drawn sword, vigorously urging him to defend himself for having cast a slur upon the honour of a seer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the top of the pine was a nest of young ravens, and down on the ground were two young ravens piping and lamenting: “Father and mother have flown away and left us to feed ourselves, and we poor fledglings do not yet know how to fly. Oh! help, George, help! fill our maws, for really we are dying of hunger.” George did not reflect long; leapt from his horse and thrust his sword into its side that the young ravens might have something to devour. ”

“ In the first place, all the stories are annual myths. In the next place, all are more or less impregnated, so to say, with the elements of frost and cold. And, lastly, in all the stories the hero is not the sun, but the revivifying forces of nature acting upon the surface of our globe, and which bring dead nature
to life again in spring. There is not a vestige of a myth of the dawn. Even in the Vedas it does not seem certain that any of the myths were originally dawn-myths, and a little reflection will show that if they are very primitive they cannot have been. ”

“ Tell me, then, doggy, to which of us does that dummy maiden belong?’ Doggy was silent; but instead of the dog, the king’s daughter replied: “To whom should she belong but to thee? What is there in a carven dummy without life? What in a tailor-made suit of clothes without speech? Thou gavest her the best gift, life and speech, and therefore she belongs of right to thee.” “Thou hast thyself given judgment about thyself,” said Vanek. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The black priest or sorcerer is, in fact, the long black night of the Arctic winter, who, after the three days’ struggle, flies out of the window as a raven; and the dragon is the frost and ice—his agent in keeping nature spell-bound. ”

“ Sharp-Eyes went to fetch it and brought it to the king’s son. It was pure gold.
“Ho! ho! Thou art a lad beyond money’s worth,” said the king’s son. “A fool were he who would not desire to use thy services. But since thou hast such a good sight, please look again and tell me if I have still far to go to the castle of iron, and what is going on there.” “If you had been riding alone there, master,” answered Sharp-Eyes, “perhaps you would not have reached it even by next year; but with us you will get there this very day; for us and no one else they are now preparing supper.” ”

“ Probably the host of unhappy scribblers who furnish our half-educated reading public with that feeble literary pabulum, the three-volume novel, which is supposed to give a picture of modern life, is quite unconscious that the optimistic fatality which compels it to marry off its heroes and heroines at the end of the story is due to the permanent disappearance of the sun during some weeks of winter within the Arctic circle, and its re-appearance and subsequent marriage, in spring, with the re-awaking and glittering forces of life and movement that have conjured it back once more. ”

“ The poor young prince, must, willy-nilly, put the leaden dumplings into his pocket. After this he took himself off, and went forward.
On and on he went for three whole days and nights, and the further he went the more he wandered astray in the thick dark mountains. Before him was a desert, behind him a desert; not a single living creature was to be seen. Quite wearied out by the long journey he flung himself on the ground. The sound of the silver sabre spread far and wide. Above him croaked four-and-twenty ravens, scared by the clatter of the sabre, and rising on the wing, flew into the air. ”

“ The fates and Father Know-All are somehow associated as overruling human destinies, but it is the hero who succeeds in carrying off the three golden hairs; it is the hero who removes the spell from the frozen waters of the life-giving well, causes the life-giving apple tree once more to bear fruit, kills the dragon, cures the sick princess, exorcises the black prince, and dethrones the autumn king and takes his place. ”