Note 341.1 — Chapter XIV · MARRIAGE RITES.

On these two stories it would be easy to lay a stress greater than they will bear. But if they have any meaning it is in the direction we are seeking. Coming to Europe, however, we find a tale where we are on firmer ground. A Norwegian youth was curious to see if it were really true that the Huldren, or wood-women (a kind of supernatural beings), occupied the mountain-dwelling in the autumn, after it was deserted by the family for the lowlands. The story runs that he crept under a large upturned tub, and there waited until it began to grow dark. Then he heard a noise of coming and going; and it was not long before the house was filled with Huldre-folk. They immediately smelt Christian flesh, but could not find the lad, until at length a maiden discovered him beneath the tub, and pointed at him with her finger. He drew his knife and scratched her finger, so that the blood flowed. Scarcely had he done it, when the whole party surrounded him; and the girl’s mother, supported by the rest, demanded that he must now marry her daughter, because he had marked her with blood. There were several objections to marrying a Huldre-woman: among others, that she had a tail. But there was nothing else for it; and happily, when she had been instructed in the Word of God and baptized, she lost the undesirable appendage, and made the youth a faithful and loving spouse.341.1 Now it may very well be that the reason for compelling this marriage is incomprehensible to the modern teller of the story, at least as a serious one. Yet the story can hardly have arisen and been propagated, with the incident in question as its catastrophe, unless a custom of marking with blood in connection with a wedding ceremony had been known to the original tellers. The barbarous nature of the custom is indicative of a much lower grade of civilisation than the Norwegian people have now, and long since, attained. And its ascription to the Huldre-folk suggests that it was practised by a non-Aryan race rather than by the Norsemen. It was certainly practised by the Finns; for a Finnish poem, entitled The Sun’s Son, describes its hero’s wedding ceremony in the following terms:—The bride’s father “leads and places them on the whale’s, the sea-king’s, hide. He scratches them both on their little fingers, mixes the blood together, lays hand in hand, unites breast to breast, knits the kisses together, bans the knots that jealousy has conjured, separates the hands, and looses the knots of the espousal.”342.1 The correspondence of this rite with that of the aborigines of Bengal extends to the fingers whence the blood is drawn; and it cannot be doubted that we have here in full the ceremony referred to in the Norwegian tale. It will be remembered that the Icelandic saga of the farmer who appropriated a fairy cow stops short in its description of the act with the drawing of blood. The story now before us has suffered a similar curtailment.342.2