women to bring his prey ashore, while he quietly puts his weapons together and goes up to his house.
But one evening he does not return, for all her waiting and gazing; all the others have come—him the sea has taken. She weeps and weeps, she can never survive the blow. But her despair does not last long; after all, there are other men in the world, and she begins to look on them with favour.
The pure-bred Eskimo generally marries as soon as he can provide for a wife. The motive is not always love; 'the right one' has perhaps not yet appeared on the scene; but he marries because he requires a woman's help to prepare his skins, make his clothes, and so forth. He often marries, it is said, before he is of an age to beget children. On the east coast, indeed, according to Holm, it is quite common for a man to have been married three or four times before that age.[1]
Marriage in Greenland was, in earlier times, a very simple matter. When a man had a mind to a girl, he went to her house or tent, seized her by the hair or wherever he could best get hold of her, and dragged her without further ceremony home to his house,[2] where her place was assigned her upon the
- ↑ Meddelelser om Grönland, pt. 10, p. 94.
- ↑ It sometimes happened, too, that he got others to do this for him; but the affair must always take the form of a capture or abduction. Similar customs, as is well known, formerly prevailed in Europe, and have even, in certain places, survived down to our own day.
