From: Weihe, David (Weihe@danet.com)
Date: Wed 13 Sep 2000 - 01:30:13 EEST
> From: donald@grove.demon.co.uk (Donald R. Oddy)
> On a similar topic, what's the Orlanthi view on bride stealing?
> Cattle raiding is clearly OK and I can imagine the same view
> applies to raiding another clan for a wife. Clearly if she (or he)
> refuses the marriage it won't occur but otherwise it could cause
> immense complications both over dowery and bride price as well
> as a member of a hostile clan within your own.
Orlanthi myth looks back on the early part of the Storm Age as
a time where the Storm Tribe started as little more than wretched
(ie, kinless) bandits who gradually come together under Umath's
leadership, much as did Romulus and Remus' band in Roman legend. I
have no doubt that many old Storm myths are analogs to The Rape
of the Sabine Women (rape in this case the original meaning of
stealing them, not necessarily forced sex). As an example,
intelligent Sea races are, save one, supposedly the result of
Storm Tribesmen taking Sea tribe bedpartners, half of them by rape
(in the modern, not Roman, sense) rather than by seduction (at least
according to the GodLearnerized theories that we now have).
This implies that marriage-by-capture will still exist in old forms
of the marriage rites, especially when taking an under-wife, albeit
ritualized to be as harmless as burning manshaped sheaves of grain
rather than a live man at harvest. This could especially be common
when several men marry women of the same stead at the same time, with
the men and their friends/brothers making up a mock warparty.
OTOH, actually engaging in bride-stealing is probably restricted to
bandits and other Vadrudi (well, maybe in East Ralios, too, as I
remember a number of Celtic stories where the husband has to kill
his father-in-law to wed a willing bride [Cuchulain and Emer, as
well as one from the Mabinogion set during Arthur's reign]). Modern
Orlanthi have far too much Ernaldan influences to really allow any
actual bride-stealing to take place.
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