Once it’s known that the groom is on the hunt: They did this by telling you to go find her and strip her naked. If her parents were satisfied with your work, they’d give you permission to marry the girl. There, once upon a time, if you wanted to marry a girl you basically sold yourself into a brief slavery to her parents. In the Northeast corner of Russia lived the Kamschatkadal (Kamchadal). The History of Human Marriage, Volume 2, Westermarck 4. If the girl had allowed the man to keep hold of her sash until the end, they were then considered married. When the dance ends, the chief calls out the names of the couples still attached. If she doesn’t want to marry him, she takes it away from him, and he was to go away. A man grabs hold of it if he wants to marry her. The people dance, and unmarried girls wear a sash. The Lillooet Indians, from what is now British Columbia, had a ritual called “the touching dance.” And it is by far the sweetest and sanest marriage tradition that my research turned up. The Cambrian Popular Antiquities, Peter Roberts 3. Then everyone would have another pretend fight.įinally, after a day spent smacking and singing, the bride would be safely conveyed to her husband’s home, where the party, certainly involving loads more smacking and singing, would continue into the night. Then the men would gently take the bride, and carry her off, her friends in pursuit. If the girls ran out of poetry and songs to sing back at you, the door had to be opened. If you managed to get to the bride’s house, you had to recite poetry and sing witty songs through the door to the girls inside. If you won, you were still nowhere near uniting your friend and his wife. Even if you got past the face-smacker, the bride’s friends would block your way and demand trials of skill (games) that could not be declined. The bride’s friends, of course, have laid booby traps and obstacles all over the road to her house, like straw ropes tied between trees, and some sort of freestanding face-smacking machine called a gwyntyn (“quintain” in English) that was meant to knock people off their horses. The bride and groom went back to their separate houses, and the groom’s friends got on their horses and charged like a battalion toward the bride’s house, a piper cheering them on the whole way (somehow). Observe.įirst they got the whole official churchy marriage ceremony quickly and quietly out of the way. Apparently the Welsh enjoy a good long siege, whether it be the mightiest empire on Earth, or your own wedding in 1815. It took the Romans 30 years to conquer that tiny little corner of the UK that is Wales.
Face-Smackers, Trip Wires and Poetry: A Welsh Marriage English Traditions and Foreign Customs, George Laurence Gomme 2. No words are spoken, but the marriage is annulled, and the father takes his dowry and befrailed daughter back home. This announces to everyone present that the groom has found that his wife had been “frail” (the term used by the author writing in 1802) before marriage and he is dissatisfied. But if, when the groom lets go of the cup, the hole he’d been plugging with his finger opens and all the wine pours out, the wedding is off. Hopefully, the cup is just a cup, and the two men drink the wine inside together and the marriage is happily cemented. He gives the cup to the bride’s father, and one of two things happens. The next morning, the whole village gathers around the site of said bliss. When two people married, the ceremony was quite normal by today's standards, with feasting, happiness, and seeing the new couple off to the conjugal bliss of their wedding night. The Abyssinians (now known as the Habesha People, who inhabit the Horn of Africa) had a ceremony involving wine, a cup, and a hole. So if you think the observations seem a little too.anthropological, well, that’s the reason. Note: Nearly all of these traditions were recorded by non-native observers between 100 and 250 years ago. Besides, showing your tush to the camera isn’t the strangest or most objectionable wedding tradition that the human race has dreamt up in the past few centuries. Hey, how you want to remember your wedding is your business, and if you and your friends are a cheeky crowd, well, bottoms up. It appears that a growing number of bridal parties are celebrating the joy and solemnity of marriage by mooning the wedding photographer.
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