Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 Excerpt: ... If this second illustration, drawn as far as possible to scale, and representing the second half of the eight primitive annual solar fairy stories, be compared with the previous illustration, the symmetry of the one and the irregularity of the other cannot fail to strike the reader's imagination. The first is symmetrical because it represents the conventional myth fashioned, so to say, upon the rigid unchanging block of the six weeks' journey of the sun through the Arctic winter night from its first disappearance on the 1st December to its re-appearance forty-two days later in January. The second is irregular because the partial thaws and spells of warm weather, heralding the return of spring, are differently distributed in different years, and the final break-up of the reign of winter is also very variable in date. The only event which is of constant occurrence in this second half of the eight fairy stories, is the three days' struggle for the light, and even this is absent in Eight remains Eight, that story being a degraded and moralized version of Father Know-All, in which the rape of the three hairs occurs within the castle of gold instead of a twelve hours' journey beyond it. There is a certain correspondence--more apparent, however, than real--in the incident of the well; but in general the distribution of the incidents is so different in each of the eight stories as to form the strongest possible contrast with the mathematical regularity of the first group, which were capable of being exactly drawn to scale. Now the primitive annual solar fairy story's period may be compared to a ribbon a little more than sixty-one inches in length, this length being constant to represent the one year, three months, one week, and a few days deduced roughly from Fath...
