Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/479

Rh shall complete the information which these scholars have given by citing certain peculiar customs still in use among Russian peasants.

Whilst the father is considered to be the proper person to dispose of the hand of the bride, the brother, according to the wedding ritual, appears as the chief protector of her virginity. In more than one province of Russia the brother plays an important part in that portion of the nuptial ceremony which may be called by the Latin name of . As soon as the bridegroom has made his appearance in the court-yard of the family to which his bride belongs, the brother, in accordance with an old custom, takes his seat next the bride with a naked sword, or at least a stick, in his hand. The bridegroom or the grooms-man, asking to be allowed to take his seat, receives as answer, that the brother is there to keep ward over his sister, and that he will not consent to leave his seat unless he be paid for it. “Dear brother, don’t give me away for nothing. Ask a hundred roubles for me, for the veil which covers my head, a thousand roubles. Ask for my beauty God alone knows how much.” Such is the tenor of the song composed for the occasion. “The brother, a true Tartar,” we read in the text of another nuptial song, “has sold his sister for a thaler, and her fair tresses for fifty copecks.”

In Little Russia the drawn sword, which the brother holds in his hand on the occasion, is ornamented with the red berries of the guelder-rose, red being the emblem of maidenhood among Slavonic peoples. Other emblems are the binding of the bride’s tresses, and the veil which covers her head. The bridegroom is not allowed to remove the veil, nor to unbind the tresses of his future wife, unless he consents to pay a small sum of money to her brother.

Hitherto we have considered the different aspects of the earliest period in the evolution of the family that which is known by the term of the matriarchate. The various