Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/143

Rh men haling the handmaids in foul wise through the fair house, and wine drawn wastefully, and the wooers devouring food all recklessly." "Ye wasted my house, and lay with the maidservants by force, and treacherously wooed my wife while I was yet alive."

And so with the supreme indignity inflicted on the disguised prince, when Ctesippus flings an ox-foot at him. We know that this was but an old rude sport of our forefathers, which must have seemed coarse and unseemly to the refined Greeks who listened to the lay. In one of the Highland tales, for instance, a man is flung under the table "and there was not one of the company but cast bone upon him as he lay." The habit was familiar to the Norsemen, and it was in the course of a rough revel like this that Archbishop Elphege was slain.

But what is particularly noticeable is that with all this stress laid on early custom, of which the real significance had been forgotten in Homeric times, the really serious crime imputed to the Suitors, the conspiracy against the life of Telemachus (though Penelope lays stress upon it), does not form a count of the final indictment which Odysseus lays against them. This alone seems to me clearly to show the mode in which the poet strengthened the situation, and how, on the whole, the ancient folk-tradition over-mastered him.

I suggest, then, that there is some reason for concluding, mainly on the basis of stratification of custom, that the original nucleus of the Saga may have been that of a tribal council sitting to dispose of the widow. The kinsmen for the purpose of dramatic effect are turned into a body of audacious ruffians, and the right of entertainment at the