Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/156

132 Lastly, among the folklore incidents of the Saga of the Wooing, we have the awarding of the bride to the hero who succeeds in performing some feat of skill. Penelope offers her hand to "whosoever shall most easily string the bow and shoot through the twelve axes." But the test is arranged in such a confused way that the commentators have much difficulty in explaining it, and it would seem here, too, that Homer was using old materials and did not exactly realise the conditions of the contest. The whole conception is nothing but that of the ancient Aryan Svayamvara, the contest in public for the hand of the bride, which appears in so many of the Indian tales, and is perhaps as old as or older than most of the folk tradition which is utilised in our Saga. It is hardly necessary to say that the bow-bending feat appears all through folklore. In Greece we have the case of Timanthes, who, as Pausanias tells us, had himself cremated when he could no longer bend his bow. In the Indian epic of the Râmâyana, Râma breaks the bow of Siva; and by the same feat in the Mahâbhârata Arjuna wins the hand of Draupadi. The rule of fighting for the bride, of which the bow contest is a modified form, is common to all early marriage ritual. We have it in England in the cases of racing for the bride, as for instance in the Rowhope wedding on the Scotch border.

I have thus endeavoured, however imperfectly, to analyse some of the primitive customs and folklore which seem to