The setting of these stories should be noticed. We see the simplicity of the habits and life so vividly represented. All folk-legends deal with country people living near to nature. So similar, indeed, are the customs depicted throughout that these folk-records might well be taken as a picture of the social organisation among many barbarous tribes. I should like to wait to point out these resemblances, such, for instance, as the tendency to personify natural objects, the identification of human beings with animals and trees, found so often in the stories, as well as many other things—the belief in magic and the power of wise women. And what I want to make clear is the very early beginning of these folk-tales; they take us back to the social institutions of the mother-age. Thus there is nothing surprising to find that kingdoms and riches are won by hero-lovers, and that daughters carry the inheritance. This is really what used to happen. It is our individual ideas and patriarchal customs that make these things seem so strange.
I wish I had space in which to follow further these still-speaking relics of a past, whose interest offers such rich reward. In his essay “Ashiepattle, or Hans seeks his Luck” (The Chances of Death, Vol. II, pp. 51-91), Prof. Karl Pearson has fully and beautifully shown the evidence for mother-right to be found in these stories. To this essay the reader, who still is in doubt, is referred. All that has been possible to me is to suggest an inquiry that any one can pursue for himself. It is the difficulty of treating so wide and fascinating a subject in briefest outline that so many things that should be noticed have to be passed over.
The witness afforded by these folk-stories for mother-right cannot be neglected. For what interpretation are we to place on the curious facts they record? Are we to regard this maternal marriage with descent through the daughter, and not the son, as idle inventions of the storytellers? Do these princesses and their peasant wooers belong to the topsy-turvy land of fairies? No: in these stories, drawn from so many various countries, we have echoes of a very distant past. It is by placing the customs here represented by the side of similar social conditions still to be found among primitive maternal peoples, that we find their significance. We then understand that these old, old stories of the folk really take us back to the age in which they first took form. We have read these “fairy stories” to our children, unknowing what they signified—a prophetic succession of witnesses, pointing us back to the ripening of that phase of the communal family, before the establishment of the individual patriarchal rule, when the law was mother-right, and all inheritance was through women.
I would add to this chapter a notice I have just recently lighted on[246] of the ancient warrior, Queen Meave of Ireland. She is represented as tall and beautiful, terrible in her battle chariot, when she drove full speed into the press of fighting men. Her virtues were those of a warlike barbarian king, and she claimed the like large liberty in morals. Her husband was Ailill, the Connaught king; their marriage was literally a partnership wherein Meave, making her own terms, demanded from her husband exact equality of treatment. The three essential qualities on which she insisted were that he should be brave, and generous, and completely devoid of jealousy.
FOOTNOTES:
[230] Cushing, Zuñi Creation Myths.
[231] Gen. ii, 18, 21-23.
[232] McLennan, Studies, “Kinship in Ancient Greece”; Letourneau, Evolution of Marriage, pp. 336-337, and Starcke, The Primitive Family, pp. 115-116.
[233] Starcke, pp. 249-250, citing Bachofen’s Antiquarische Briefe, Vol. I, p. 140.
[234] K. Pearson, Chances of Death, Vol. II, Essays on the Mother-age Civilisation, etc. Many of the facts given in this chapter are taken from these illuminative essays.