Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/142

118 The real motive of the rite was to convey the goods of the deceased for his use in the other world.

In the case of the Wooers, then, I venture to suggest that there may have been some old tribal custom, which, as we have seen in the case of the subordinate chiefs with a right of free messing at the table of the Homeric king, entitled them to entertainment when they assembled for tribal business, such as disposing of the hand of Penelope, that in some cases this right of free entertainment may have been used as a mode of pressure on a family indisposed to accept at once the ruling of the tribal council. We have the same custom in India, where, when a family refuse to accept the decree of the Panchayat, the meeting is adjourned time after time. The parties concerned have on each occasion to provide a dinner for the councillors, and the pressure of this tax sooner or later forces them to accept the verdict or arrange the matter by compromise. Coupled with this, there may have been a vague tradition of the prevalence of loot and outrage on the occasion of an interregnum, and of the custom of appropriation, by the claimant to the throne, of the harem of his predecessor. Much of this may have been only half-realised, or only imperfectly understood, by the poet of a refined age dealing with a mass of primitive floating tradition. He moulded freely all this material to suit the exigencies of his subject, and the result was summed up in the charge made by Odysseus against the wooers: "The unseemly deeds, strangers shamefully entreated, the