Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/459

Rh Marriage with Capture.—§ 1. By this I understand capture of a bride, associated with some other form of marriage, such as that by purchase. In marriage by capture, a man carries off and appropriates a woman, and that ends the matter. Mr. Mainoff was certainly of opinion that the old habitual method of obtaining a wife among the Mordvins was by capture, without, however, assigning any special reason for this belief. He probably imagined that it was a necessary survival from a remote epoch, when it was the only way of securing for oneself a wife. But this hypothesis is, I submit, an erroneous one. As marriage by purchase is, or is known to have once been, a usage among the Finns, Esthonians, Cheremis, Votiaks, Voguls, Ostiaks, Samoyedes, Turks, Jakuts, and Mongols, its origin among the Erza and Moksha Mordvins can be of no recent date; its antiquity must be very great, reaching back, for all we know, to the polished stone period. No doubt during the centuries that have elapsed since purchase of the bride became an institution there have been concurrently endless instances of capture of women made by men of one tribe at war with another. But these instances hardly explain marriage with capture. Georgi (Descrip., i, 71) describes the capture of girls among the Cheremis and Votiaks almost in the same words as Mainoff. If the abductor is overtaken he loses his bride and receives a sound cudgelling. Should he escape, he consummates the marriage before witnesses, so as to get her at a reduced price, for the parents, in spite of this outrage, will not part with her for nothing. The marriage is afterwards celebrated in the usual way. Here the reason of the capture is simply to lower the price of the bride, and the capture itself is merely an interlude in a marriage by purchase. Ahlqvist (Unter Wogulen, p. 159) mentions that the Ostiaks occasionally resort to capture to shirk paying the kalym, which is often enormous, and requires years to pay. The Avars and Khevsurs of the Caucasus frequently run away with a bride for the avowed reason of