Walter William Strickland

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This plan of the second half of the Three Citrons is a necessary deduction from comparing the Sun-horse, Father Know-All and the Three Citrons with the corresponding and later variants in Bernoni’s Venetian folk-lore. The merit of the great Venetian folk-lorist’s work is that it is an absolutely plain unvarnished tale, every syllable of which has been taken down direct from the mouths of the common people; it is, therefore, absolutely to be relied upon. ”