Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/168

 140 that one of these methods, the contest for the crown in a race or a fight, was the recognised and customary way of settling the succession to the throne in ancient Greece.

Meanwhile all these incidents are märchenhaft; they are romantic stock situations; if such modes of acquiring royalty were once universally customary, it must have been in the world of early human fancies, not of facts.

Before we can infer that even one of these many incidents was ever matter of custom so widely diffused that it has coloured the märchen of the world, and the shape that they take in Greek saga, we must discover many examples of the custom with valid historical record, observed and described by competent witnesses. For one incident, the bride-race, or the race for the crown, Mr. Frazer cites the Alitemnian Libyans, while the Svayamvara, where the maiden chose one of her crowd of suitors or was offered as the prize in a trial of skill, "was occasionally observed among the Rajputs down to a late time." Several German and one English treatise on Hindu Law are cited in support. Of course sporting Rajputs may have imitated what they knew from märchen or from sagas (the Mahabhârata). Or the Rajputs may really, like the Alitemnian Libyans, have had the usage of giving the crown, or the bride, to the swiftest or most dexterous competitor. But examples of this one usage, historically observed in the ancient world, have only the authority of Nicolaus Damascenus, in one instance, so far as I am aware. Surely that is not enough to prove that all the body of such eccentric customs in the märchen of the world are survivals of universal usages. The usage, necessary to Mr. Cook's Minotaur theory, of slaying unsuccessful competitors, is, as far as I know, without