Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/494

 44^ Correspondence.

rewards the fancy of the race pictured for him, he might win to the Other-world, not to a realm of disembodied bloodless shadows, but to a land of which the divine inmates were immortally young and fair.

Alfred Nutt.

A Brittany Marriage Custom.

It is the custom in parts of Brittany for a girl just wedded to make an incision under the left breast immediately the ceremony in church is over. The bridegroom then applies his lips and sucks a drop of her blood. I have been informed of this curious custom by M. Jean Guyot de Villeneuve, the well-known French politician, who, however, could not tell me what significance attaches thereto in the popular mind. Can it be the object of it to make the man of one blood and kin with the woman, so that the children may be of her kin? It seems to resemble the wide-spread rite of blood-brotherhood, so well described in Trumbull's The Blood Covenant (New York, 1885). I should be glad to learn if the survival of such a custom among the Bretons is generally known.

F. C. CONYBEARE.

I have noted a number of these cases in the Legend of Perseus^ vol. ii., pp. 338 sqq., and I have since discovered more, but none of them from Brittany. In Folklore^ vol. xvi., p. 337, there is a South-Welsh story of a salmon-girl who kisses the hero with a bloody mouth, so as to leave her blood upon his face: this binds him to her. Again, in vol. xvii., p. 114, Mr. Crooke notes that in the South of Ireland if a little boy hurts a girl playfellow so as to draw blood, his nurse says to him, " Now youll have to marry her." On the other hand, in the story of The Wooing of Emer., when Cuchulainn sucks from Devorgoil's wound the stone that had struck her from his sling, he becomes her blood-brother, and cannot therefore marry her. Here we have Welsh, Bretons, and modern Southern