Danish story of King Gorm the Old, who married the English princess Thyra,
the daughter of Ethelred. She insisted on three days’ sexual abstinence before
the marriage was consummated. The gallant Gorm respected her wishes and
divided the marital bed into two compartments by placing a naked sword
down the middle.^83
In one of the Ossetic Nart sagas Axsartag’s beautiful bride Dserassa
mistakes his twin brother Axsar for her husband. Axsar does not disabuse her,
but he does not abuse her either. He goes to bed with her at bedtime, but to
avoid intimate contact he draws his sword from its scabbard and lays it
between them (Sikojev (1985), 19). In the Armenian oral epic it is the woman
who takes this step, in order to set her husband a challenge. Mher and Kohar
celebrate their wedding with a seven-day feast. ‘Mher went to Kohar’s bed at
night; she laid a sword between Mher and herself. –– The King of the West is
collecting a tax from us, she said; if you can put an end to that, I will be your
wife, you will be my husband’ (Sassountsy David 360).
Is the sword in the bed a traditional Indo-European motif? Not as such,
because the article in question, a sword with a long sharp blade, did not
exist until the technique of bronze-working developed to the point where it
was possible to make such a weapon, that is to say, not until the second
millennium. The Indo-Europeans of the fourth or third millennium had
daggers but not swords. A dagger would be less suited to the purpose.
However, the idea of the barrier separating a man and woman in bed may
have existed before the invention of the sword. We find it at the extremities of
the Indo-European world, in the Western Isles and India, with different
objects forming the barrier. Diarmaid and Gráinne in an oral Gaelic account
sleep separated by a cold stone. In India three days of sexual abstinence were
required of newly-weds, and for those nights a perfumed staff, wound with
cloth or threads, was laid between them.^84 Here, no doubt, we see the origin of
the mythical motif, in a custom of real life.
Winning her back; the Husband’s ReturnIf a wife is taken from her husband, a further field for heroic action is opened
up. Helen’s abduction is the basis for the central mythical cycle of Greek
tradition, that revolving about the Trojan War. An abducted wife is a major
theme in each of the two great Indian epics. The robbed husband (or
(^83) Saxo 9. 11. 3 p. 267; cf. Davidson (1979–80), ii. 164.
(^84) J. G. Campbell, The Fians (London 1891), 56; A ̄pastamba, Gr
̇
hyasu ̄tra 3. 8. 9; Oldenberg
(1917), 88 n. 2, 253; Sergent (1995), 230.
- King and Hero 437