Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/78

 lxxiv remains to note that cannibalism is the most frequent form of peril in German and Modern Greek, and English and Indian, as in Zulu, Hottentot, Eskimo, and Samoyed Household Tales. The appearance of cannibalism in the stories of savages is perfectly natural. Why it should occur so frequently in European tales (unless it be a survival) it were difficult to explain. The ferocious cruelty of the punishments inflicted on evil-doers in the European tales need not date further back than the middle ages, which were vindictive enough in their penalties.

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It is a place guarded by strange beasts. No living man may enter there and return to the upper world if he has tasted the food of Hell. The best known Household Tale on this topic is Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. Psyche's adventures in Hades fully agree with Ojibway, Melanesian, Japanese, Mangaian, Maori, Etruscan, and Finnish descriptions of the homes of the departed (Kalewala. Canto XVI. Taylor's New Zealand, p. 233. Codrington, 'Religious Ideas of the Melanesians,' Journal Anthrop. Inst., x. iii. Gill, Myths of South Pacific, p. 102. Kohl (Ojibways), p. 211. It is to a pagan Hades of the sort indicated in these references that people in Märchen go, when in quest of "the Deil.")

q7 [sic].

Among the strange taboos, or mystic prohibitions of harmless things common to savage races, none are more frequent than taboos on the intercourse of husband and wife. Sometimes they may not meet by daylight, sometimes the wife may not name the husband. The old Spartan rule which made a bridegroom visit his wife only by stealth, was probably a survival from these taboos. As specimens of the rules we may take Astley's Voyages, ii. 240. Wives in Futa never permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after marriage. Amongst the Yorubas, "conventional modesty forbids a woman to speak to her husband, or even to see him if it can be avoided." (Bowen, Central Africa, p. 303). Of the Iroquois, Lafitau says, "Ils n'osent aller dans les cabanes particulières où habitent leurs épouses que durant l'obscurité de la nuit" (Lafitau, i. 576). The Circassian women have a similar scruple "till they have borne a child " (Lubbock, O. C. 1875, p. 75). Similar examples are reported from Fiji. In the Bulgarian ballad (Dozon, p. 172), the woman tells her daughter that she must not speak to her bridegroom for nine whole months. In Zululand, as is well known, the name of the husband, and words like the name of the husband are tabooed to the women.

By way of saving space, Mr. Ralston's article on 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Cinderella' (Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1878), may be referred to for examples in tales of husbands and wives mysteriously punished for seeing each other when they should not have done so. Instances