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the sleeper rests unawakcned until she feels the magic touch of the
only being who can rouse her. With either of these ideas it was
possible and easy to work out the myth into an infinite variety of
detail ; and thus in the northern story Persephone becomes the
maiden Brynhild who sleeps within the flaming walls, as the heroine
of the Hindu tales lies in a palace of glass surrounded by seven
hedges of spears. But she must sleep until the knight arrives who
is to slay the dragon, and the successful exploit of Sigurd would
suggest the failure of weaker men who had made the same attempt
before him. Thus we have the germ of those countless tales in which
the father promises to bestow his daughter on the man who can either
leap over the wall of spears or work his way through the hedge of
thorns, or slay the monster who guards her dwelling, death being
the penalty for all who try and fail. The victorious knight is the
sun when it has gained sufficient strength to break the chains of
winter and set the maiden free ; the luckless beings who precede
him are the suns which rise and set, making vain efforts in the first
bleak days of spring to rouse nature from her deathlike slumbers.
This is the simple tale of Dornroschen or Briar Rose, who pricks her
finger with a spindle and falls into a sleep of a hundred years, the
spindle answering here to the stupifying narcissus in the myth of
Persephone. This sudden touch of winter, arresting all the life and
activity of nature, followed in some climates by a return of spring
scarcely less sudden, would naturally suggest the idea of human
sleepers resuming their tasks at the precise point at which they were
interrupted ; and thus when, after many princes who had died while
trying to force their way through the hedge of briars, the king's son
arrives at the end of the fated time and finds the way open, an air
of burlesque is given to the tale (scarcely more extravagant, however,
than that which Euripides has imparted to the deliverer of Alkestis),
and the cook on his waking gives the scullion boy a blow which he
had raised his hand to strike a hundred years ago.
This myth of the stealing away of the summer-child is told in Grimm's story of Rapunzel, where the witch's garden is the earth with its fertilising powers pent up within high walls. Rapunzel her- self is Kore, the maiden, the Rose of the Alhambra, while the witch is the icy Fredegonda, whose story Washington Irving has told with marvellous but unconscious fidelity. The maiden is shut up, like Danae, in a high tower, but the sequel reverses the Argive legend. It is not Zeus who comes in the form of a golden shower, but the prince who ascends on the long golden locks which stream to the earth from the head of Rapunzel. In the story of the Dwarfs Perse-
The story of Rapunzel.
