[Sidenote: A reminiscence of the transmission of the kingship through women is preserved in popular tales.] Thus it would seem that among some Aryan peoples, at a certain stage of their social evolution, it has been customary to regard women and not men as the channels in which royal blood flows, and to bestow the kingdom in each successive generation on a man of another family, and often of another country, who marries one of the princesses and reigns over his wife’s people. A common type of popular tale, which relates how an adventurer, coming to a strange land, wins the hand of the king’s daughter and with her the half or the whole of the kingdom, may well be a reminiscence of a real custom.[908] [Sidenote: Where such customs prevail, the kingship is an appanage of marriage with a princess.] Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail, it is obvious that the kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the blood royal. The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary queen of Scotland, and her statement is all the more significant because, as we shall see presently, it reflects the actual practice of the Pictish kings. “Indeed she was a queen,” says Hermutrude, “and but that her sex gainsaid it, might be deemed a king; nay (and this is yet truer), whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her sceptre and her hand went together.”[909] Wherever a custom of this sort is observed, a man may clearly acquire the kingdom just as well by marrying the widow as the daughter of his predecessor. This is what Aegisthus did at Mycenae, and what Hamlet’s uncle Feng and Hamlet’s successor Wiglet did in Denmark; all three slew their predecessors, married their widows, and then sat peacefully on the throne.[910] The tame submission of the people to their rule would be intelligible, if they regarded the assassins, in spite of their crime, as the lawful occupants of the throne by reason of their marriage with the widowed queens. Similarly, Gyges murdered Candaules, King of Lydia, [Sidenote: The Lydian kingship apparently transmitted through women.] married his queen, and reigned over the country.[911] Nor was this the only instance of such a succession in the history of Lydia. The wife of King Cadys conspired against his life with her paramour Spermus, and though her husband recovered from the dose of poison which she administered to him, he died soon afterwards, and the adulterer married his leman and succeeded to the throne.[912] These cases excite a suspicion that in the royal house of Lydia descent was traced in the female line, and the suspicion is strengthened by the legendary character of Omphale, the ancestress of the dynasty. For she is represented as a masculine but dissolute queen of the Semiramis type, who wore male attire and put all