Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/480

474 features which characterised the lowest state of the relations between the sexes did not vanish all at once. The incestuous relations between persons of the same blood seem to have been the first to disappear. No further mention of these occurs in Nestor’s description of the Eastern tribes—the Radimich, Viatich, and Sever. Though they practise communal marriage so far that fathers and sons have wives in common, nevertheless fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, dare no longer cohabit with each other, and if licence still occurs at some annual festivities, it is kept under some check.

The bilini, or popular ballads, as also the old legends and folk-tales, often represent that transient period of social evolution, when endogamy was gradually giving way to exogamy, and relations between persons of the same kin were forbidden. A popular hero, known by the name of Michailo Kasarinov, and belonging to a later series of Russian paladins, in one of these ballads liberates a young Russian girl from the yoke of the Tartars, and is on the point of becoming her lover, when she discloses to him the secret of her birth, and proves that she is his sister. The paladin immediately abandons his purpose. In another popular tale, inserted by Afanasiov in his collection of these curious monuments of our unwritten literature, a brother is represented as insisting on marrying his sister, and the latter as strongly protesting against his desire. “What do you propose to do?” she asks. “Bethink you of God and of the sin? Is it right that a brother should espouse his own sister?” The brother persists, and the couple are on the point of retiring, when the earth opens, and the sister, unharmed, disappears from view. In another popular legend, a husband, having discovered that his wife is his own sister, finds no means of escape but that of undertaking a pilgrimage in order to expiate his sins. The prohibition is gradually extended to all persons of