Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/135

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This modification of the plot, again, seems to be established by instances of what may be called stratification of custom, which appear obscurely in the Saga as we have it. Thus, in Homer the wives are purchased ; but when Antinous proposes to Telemachus to send his mother away and let her father marry her to whom he will, Telemachus objects that it is hard for him to make restitution to her father Icarius, "as needs I must if of my own will I send my mother away." This may reasonably be taken to mean that Telemachus would be forced to refund the dowry if his widowed mother returned to her parents' home. The only other possible explanation is that the ἑδνα or bride-gifts were applied by the bride's friends, wholly or in part to furnish her outfit and provide the wedding feast, "and they were thus indirectly returned to the bridegroom's side." In support of this, it is a custom among many Hindu castes that the bride-price is understood to be spent on providing the wedding feast, and the bride's outfit of clothes, brass vessels, and so on. And it is also true that in India, and elsewhere, we find a custom of providing a dowry side by side with a rule of bride-purchase. But on the whole it seems not improbable that we have in the poems instances of successive stages of marriage law in this respect — bride-purchase, refund of the bride-price after marriage, and, as in the present case, marriage by dowry. It is improbable that all these successive stages existed together in heroic times ; it seems more likely that the poet used the old tradition as far as it suited his