Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE witch's garden. 301
stow 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 Eose, 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 sug-
gest 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 Tho
CHAP,
told in Grimm's story of Kapunzel, where the witch's garden ^upunzel
is the earth with its fertilising powers pent up within high
walls. Kapunzel herself 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 un-
conscious 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 Kapunzel. In the
story of the Dwarfs Persephone is the maiden who eats a
golden apple (the narkissos), and thereupon sinks a hundred
fathoms deep in the earth, where the prince (Herakles) finds
'
.