Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/423



ELIBACY is almost unknown among the Mordvins; when it occurs it is almost always the result of a vow, and in places where Russian influence is strong. Sometimes a girl is not married in consequence of a vow to a deity—if hail, for instance, has ruined the crops, or some misfortune has befallen the family. Such a girl is termed the “wife of the hail-king”.

Mr. Mainoff was of opinion that formerly kinship, with one exception, was no bar to marriage. He arrived at this conclusion from the fact that the more the people have come under Russian and Christian influence, the more they avoid marriages between relations. In spite of all his efforts he was unable to discover why unions between closely related couples are illicit. He was simply assured that the prohibition was taken from the Russians; and in the government of Penza he found a general impression that the children born of a marriage between near relations were sickly. He believed himself that the only old national taboo was on a union between brother and sister, such as is recorded in the following Erza folk-tale narrated to him in the village of Arzamas:—

“Once upon a time there was a brother and sister.