Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/475

Rh sprung from the same father or grandfather, is also mentioned more than once by early Slavonic writers. Such marriages were not prohibited by custom among the old Bohemians or Czechs. “,” says the biographer of St. Adalbert. They are also frequently mentioned in the epic poems of our peasants, the so-called bilini, of which the late W. R. S. Ralston has given to English readers an accurate and profound analysis. I will quote certain passages from these poems to give you the facts on which my theory is based.

One of the most celebrated heroes of our popular ballads, Ilia Mourometz, encounters one day a freebooter named Nightingale (Solovei Razboinik). “Why”, asks the hero, “do all thy children look alike?” Nightingale gives the following answer: “Because, when my son is grown up, I marry him to my daughter; and when my daughter is old enough, I give her my son for a husband, and I do so in order that my race might not die out.” Another popular ballad, representing the evil customs of former days, describes them in the following manner:

Endogamous marriages still occur in a few very remote parts of Russia. Such is the case in certain villages in the district of Onega, and especially in that of Liamika, where the peasants do their best to infringe the canonical prescriptions which disallow marriage between blood relations to the fourth degree inclusively. The same has also been noticed in certain parts of the Government of Archangel, quite on the shores of the White Sea, where the peasants are in the habit of saying that marriages between blood relations will be blessed with a more rapid increase of “cattle”—the word “cattle” standing in this case for children. In some provinces of Siberia, and in the district of Vetlouga, which belongs to the government of Nijni Novgorod, endogamous marriages, though contrary to the