Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/465

 Reviews. 445

and Son Combat proper, appears in its oldest forms in the Mahabharata, the Greek tale of Ulysses and Telegonus, the Irish Cuchullainn Saga, the Persian Shah Nameh, the German Hilde- branslied, the Russian Ilya ballads, and elsewhere.

There are various forms of the narrative. In one class the father meets the mother away from home and the union is more or less ephemeral ; in the other the marriage is contracted at home and the union is regarded as permanent. In most of the forms of the story, the variants of which are carefully reviewed by Mr. Potter, the most important points are : the uncertainty as to paternity, intimately connected with the man's marriage away from home ; the prominent role played by the woman, either in wooing or in other ways ; the callous abandonment by the father of mother and child ; and, finally, the son's search for the father.

Mr. Potter mentions, and wisely rejects, various suggestions advanced to account for the Father and Son Combat incident, such as Miss Weston's theory that it represents a struggle between old and new divinities of vegetation, a theme illustrated in Dr. Frazer's treatment of the Arician rite ; and Liebrecht's explana- tion that it arises from a custom, such as that found in Raratonga, where the son, as he grew up, fought with his father for the pos- session of the paternal property.

Mr. Potter's explanation is on quite other lines. He suggests that the marriage or connection of the woman with a stranger implies exogamy, and that the prominence of the role played by the woman is based on a condition of matriarchy, under which the woman has the fullest liberty of choosing her lover, while, as in marriages of the Beena form, the man lives permanently or only temporarily in the family of the relations of his bride, who retain the right to admit into their own clan the offspring of the union. In the course of the discussion of this theory Mr. Potter reviews at considerable length several questions connected with the early law of marriage, such as Exogamy, the Matriarchate, Polyandry and Polygamy, Divorce, Sexual Hospitality, Wooing and Lack of Chastity in women, and the Swayamvara, or Choosing of Husbands. These are all well-worn questions of anthropology ; most of his instances are taken from famihar sources, and I am inclined to think that little fresh evidence, beyond that already to be found in books like those of Dr. Westermarck, is produced which is likely to advance the solution of the question.