Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/470

464 The same author narrates that three other Slavonic tribes, the Radimich, the Viatich, and the Sever, had the same customs; they lived “in forests, like other wild animals, they ate everything unclean, and shameful things occurred amongst them between fathers and daughters-in-law. Marriages were unknown to them, but games were held in the outskirts of villages; they met at these games for dancing and every kind of diabolic amusement, and there they captured their wives, each man the one he had covenanted with. They had generally two or three wives.”

I have tried to give the nearest possible translation of this old Russian text, the interpretation of which, however, gives rise to certain difficulties not yet quite settled. I will now classify, to the best of my power, the various facts which we can infer from this text. First of all, it establishes the fact that marriage, in the sense of a constant union between husband and wife, was not a general institution among the Eastern Slavs. With the exception of the more civilised Polians, no other tribe is stated to have any notion of it. Of course this does not mean that all alike were entirely ignorant of the meaning of family life. It only means that their, mode of constituting a family did not correspond to the idea which the author, who, as we have said, was a monk, entertained as to matrimonial revelations. The Radimich, Viatich, and Sever captured their wives after having previously come to an agreement with them. This certainly is a method which would meet with the approval of a Christian, but nevertheless it is marriage. We have before us an example of what ethnologists have named “marriage by capture”.

The Drevlians were even less advanced as regards the intercourse between the sexes. They also had games at which women were captured, but not a word is said about any covenant entered into by the captor and his supposed victim. Neither is any mention made of these games being held on the boundaries or outskirts of villages—a fact which would point to the existence of a sort of exogamy