“Once there was an old couple who had three sons.”

Here we are reminded of Shem, Ham, and Japheth; of Zeus, Pluto, and Neptune; of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva; of the three-pronged trident of Poseidon; of the three roots of the tree Ygdrasil.

“Two of them,” continues the legend, “had their wits about them, but the third, Ivan, was a simpleton.

“Now, in the lands in which Ivan lived there was never any day, but always night.  This was a snake’s doings.  Well, Ivan undertook to kill the snake.”

[1.  Poor, “Sanskrit Literature,” p. 236.]

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This is the same old serpent, the dragon, the apostate, the leviathan.

“Then came a third snake with twelve heads.  Ivan killed it, and destroyed the heads, and immediately there was a bright light throughout the whole land."[1]

Here we have the same series of monsters found in Hesiod, in Ragnarok, and in the legends of different nations; and the killing of the third serpent is followed by a bright light throughout the whole land—­the conflagration.

And the Russians have the legend in another form.  They tell of Ilia, the peasant, the servant of Vladimir, Fair Sun.  He meets the brigand Soloveï, a monster, a gigantic bird, called the nightingale; his claws extend for seven versts over the country.  Like the dragon of Hesiod, he was full of sounds—­“he roared like a wild beast, bowled like a dog, and whistled like a nightingale.”  Ilia bits him with an arrow in the right eye, and he tumbles headlong from his lofty nest to the earth.  The wife of the monster follows Ilia, who has attached him to his saddle, and is dragging him away; she offers cupfuls of gold, silver, and pearls—­an allusion probably to the precious metals and stones which were said to have fallen from the heavens.  The Sun (Vladimir) welcomes Ilia, and requests the monster to howl, roar, and whistle for his entertainment; he contemptuously refuses; Ilia then commands him and he obeys:  the noise is so terrible that the roof of the palace falls off, and the courtiers drop dead with fear.  Ilia, indignant at such an uproar, “cuts up the monster into little pieces, which he scatters over the fields”—­(the Drift).[2]

Subsequently Ilia hides away in a cave, unfed by

[1.  Poor, “Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures,” p. 390.

2.  Ibid., p. .281.]

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Vladimir—­that is to say, without the light of the sun.  At length the sun goes to seek him, expecting to find him starved to death; but the king’s daughter has sent him food every day for three years, and he comes out of the cave hale and hearty, and ready to fight again for Vladimir, the Fair Sun.[1] These three years are the three years of the “Fimbul-winter” of the Norse legends.

I have already quoted (see chapter viii, Part Ill, page 216, ante) the legends of the Central American race, the Quiches, preserved in the “Popul Vuh,” their sacred book, in which they describe the Age of Darkness and cold.  I quote again, from the same work, a graphic and wonderful picture of the return of the sun