The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and ReligionFrazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
Further, if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latium the royal
families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their sons to
marry princesses and reign among their wives' people, it will follow
that the male descendants would reign in successive generations over
different kingdoms. Now this seems to have happened both in ancient
Greece and in ancient Sweden; from which we may legitimately infer
that it was a custom practised by more than one branch of the Aryan
stock in Europe. Many Greek traditions relate how a prince left his
native land, and going to a far country married the king's daughter
and succeeded to the kingdom. Various reasons are assigned by
ancient Greek writers for these migrations of the princes. A common
one is that the king's son had been banished for murder. This would
explain very well why he fled his own land, but it is no reason at
all why he should become king of another. We may suspect that such
reasons are afterthoughts devised by writers, who, accustomed to the
rule that a son should succeed to his father's property and kingdom,
were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of kings' sons
who quitted the land of their birth to reign over a foreign kingdom.
In Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of similar customs.
For we read of daughters' husbands who received a share of the
kingdoms of their royal fathers-in-law, even when these
fathers-in-law had sons of their own; in particular, during the five
generations which preceded Harold the Fair-haired, male members of
the Ynglingar family, which is said to have come from Sweden, are
reported in the _Heimskringla_ or _Sagas of the Norwegian Kings_ to
have obtained at least six provinces in Norway by marriage with the
daughters of the local kings.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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