Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/424

 368 marriage are race-identity, contract, assent; the chief ceremony is the propitiation of ancestors. But of matriarchal marriage the chief sanctions are non-kinship, capture, consent; the chief ceremony is propitiation of the powers of nature. Numerous are the still surviving customs which can best be explained by the matriarchal conception of society. But it is in folk-poesy, even more than in folkcustom, that Mr. Stuart-Glennie seeks for matriarchal survivals, and it is especially in the Swan-Maiden group of tales that he finds them. Here he polemises against Mr. Hartland in what seems to me an unnecessary way, the polemic having little bearing upon the main contention. But I will leave Mr. Hartland to defend his views, as he is so well able to do. It is urged, then, that in the Swan-Maid group the father is either unmentioned or subordinate, the wife or mother is supreme, the family and not the father consent to or refuse the marriage, the hero is, as a rule, a fatherless child. Again, the Swan-Maid is always described in terms that differentiate her racially from the hero; she is only to be won by achievement, whether capture of herself, killing of her guardian, or performance of tasks; finally, the tale nearly always includes submission of the husband to a taboo, the breaking of which entails for him the loss of the wife.

This brief recapitulation of Mr. Stuart-Glennie's points will show of what importance his argument is to all who essay to explain the facts of folk-lore. I may at once express my opinion that little would be needed to bring Mr. Stuart-Glennie's and Mr. Hartland's explanations into line with each other. They impress me as being complementary rather than antagonistic. Both writers, in effect, treat the stories as evidence of a bygone social, intellectual, and moral state, which state dates back to a hoary antiquity. That in interpreting the survivals from such a remote period divergences should arise is but natural. But if it is once agreed that the stories do contain traces of a past state of humanity, correct