Jurgen

Jurgen
By James Branch Cabell.




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“Of Jurgen eke they maken mencioun,

That of an old wyf gat his youthe agoon,

And gat himselfe a shirte as bright as fyre

Wherein to jape, yet gat not his desire

In any countrie ne condicioun.”



To

Burton Rascoe

Before each tarradiddle,

Uncowed by sciolists,

Robuster persons twiddle

Tremendously big fists.
“Our gods are good,” they tell us;

“Nor will our gods defer

Remission of rude fellows’

Ability to err.”
So this, your Jurgen, travels

Content to compromise

Ordainments none unravels

Explicitly⁠ ⁠… and sighs.




A Foreword: Which Asserts Nothing

“Nescio quid certè est: et Hylax in limine latrat.”


In Continental periodicals not more than a dozen articles in all would seem to have given accounts or partial translations of the Jurgen legends. No thorough investigation of this epos can be said to have appeared in print, anywhere, prior to the publication, in 1913, of the monumental Synopses of Aryan Mythology by Angelo de Ruiz. It is unnecessary to observe that in this exhaustive digest Professor de Ruiz has given (VII,  p. 415 et sequentia) a summary of the greater part of these legends as contained in the collections of Verville and Bülg; and has discussed at length and with much learning the esoteric meaning of these folk-stories and their bearing upon questions to which the “solar theory” of myth explanation has given rise. To his volumes, and to the pages of  Mr. Lewistam’s Key to the Popular Tales of Poictesme, must be referred all those who may elect to think of Jurgen as the resplendent, journeying and procreative sun.
Equally in reading hereinafter will the judicious waive all allegorical interpretation, if merely because the suggestions hitherto advanced are inconveniently various. Thus Verville finds the Nessus shirt a symbol of retribution, where Bülg, with rather wide divergence, would have it represent the dangerous gift of genius. Then it may be remembered that  Dr. Codman says, without any hesitancy, of Mother Sereda: “This Mother Middle is the world generally (an obvious anagram of Erda es), and this Sereda rules not merely the middle of the working-days but the midst of everything. She is the factor of middleness, of mediocrity, of an avoidance of extremes, of the eternal compromise begotten by use and wont. She is the  Mrs. Grundy of the Léshy; she is Comstockery: and her shadow is common sense.” Yet Codman speaks with certainly no more authority than Prote, when the latter, in his Origins of Fable, declares this epos is “a parable of⁠ ⁠… man’s vain journeying in search of that rationality and justice which his nature craves, and discovers nowhere in the universe: and the shirt is an emblem of this instinctive craving, as⁠ ⁠… the shadow symbolizes conscience. Sereda typifies a surrender to life as it is, a giving up of man’s rebellious self-centredness and selfishness: the anagram being se dare.”
Thus do interpretations throng and clash, and neatly equal the commentators in number. Yet