Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/460

454 displaying their spirit and gallantry, but they have, notwithstanding, to pay the kalym in order to avoid a blood feud. In folk-tales there are many instances of tasks imposed by a father on the suitor for the hand of his daughter, where the tasks, if successfully performed, have a double function; they serve to obtain a valuable object—a kalym, in fact, for the father of the bride, and likewise test the suitor’s courage, dexterity, and hardihood. Any one of these three very natural reasons for eloping with a girl (1) to reduce her price, (2) to avoid payment, (3) to exhibit courage—when translated into action, attaches itself in a perfectly natural and spontaneous manner as an incident in marriage by purchase. It is self-evident that capture for either of the first two reasons must be posterior in time to the institution of the practice of paying for a bride. And if marriage with capture is as ancient as marriage by purchase, its cause is to be found rather in the innate universal desire to display courage, than as a survival of a still older practice of taking women captive in time of war. Capture for the third reason may be regarded as a stereotyped task imposed by custom, based on the double sentiment that a wife is not to be obtained too easily, and not without giving some proof of daring.

The special incidents accompanying the act of capture in § 1 seem to corroborate this view. For though the young man’s friends accompany him to the girl’s village, he goes alone to the house to carry her off—though there may be a suspicion that he has prearranged the affair with her—as if that must be the individual act of the bridegroom, to prove his personal intrepidity. Of course, it is likely enough that actual elopement, without any sort of subsequent ceremony, and without payment of the kalym, occasionally happened, but that it was ever the