Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/477

Rh than once in our popular ballads, or bilini. The name under which they are known is that of “polinitzi”, the word pole meaning the field, and in a secondary sense the battle-field.

Like the Bohemian girls described by Cosmus of Prague, these Russian Amazons chose their lovers as they liked.

“Is thy heart inclined to amuse itself with me?” such is the question addressed to Ilia Mourometz by one of these Amazons, the so-called beautiful princess. “Be my husband and I will be thy wife,” says another of these polinitzi, Anastasia the Beautiful, to the paladin, Theodor Tougarin. It is not the freebooter Nightingale who chooses his wife, nor the paladin Dobrinia who is going in search of a bride; both are represented as accepting the offers of betrothal made to them by the Russian Amazons Zaprava and Marina.

Evidence of still greater importance is that of the French writer, Beauplan, who, speaking of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of Little Russia during his time, the latter half of the seventeenth century, states as follows:

“In the Ukraine, contrary to the custom of all other nations, the husbands do not choose their wives, but are themselves chosen by their future consorts.”

I hope I have now given an amount of information, sufficient to answer the purpose I have in view; which is no other than to show that, in a low state of morality, communal marriage between near relations and endogamy went hand in hand, amongst the early Slavs, with a considerable degree of independence among the weaker sex.

To all these characteristic features of the matriarchate, we may add this very important one, that, according to the old Russian law, the tie which unites a man to his sister and the children she has brought into the world, was