Several of the Latvian songs describe how, when the wedding of the Sun’s
Daughter is celebrated, the Sun or the Sons of God decorate the trees with
green cloth, gold rings, and other ornaments.^131 This reflects the practice,
widely attested across northern and eastern Europe,^132 of decorating the May-
tree with coloured ribbons, garlands, eggshells, and trinkets at the beginning
of summer –– just when, as we have seen, the wedding of the Daughter of the
Sun was supposed to take place. Another stanza runs: ‘The Sun’s children (or
in variants the Sun’s maidens, or maid, or Saule herself ) have made a ring-
dance at the edge of the forest: put a golden girdle on me, mother, so I can run
and join the throng.’ It is plausibly argued by von Schroeder that these Sun
maidens are not mythical creatures but the mortal girls who take part in the
sun-dances.^133 Other songs describe the Sons of God and the Daughters of
Saule dancing hand in hand, or the Sons and Daughters of God (var.: the
Sun’s Daughters) dancing in the moonlight by a spring; again, perhaps,
projections of, and sung at the time of, terrestrial dances.^134 The story of the
birth and marriage of Salme, the Estonian version of Saules meita, was told in
songs for swinging, an activity, as we saw earlier, associated with spring and
midsummer and symbolic of the sun’s cyclical changes of declination.^135 Here
too myth is linked to ritual.
Helen’s wedding was a recurring event at Sparta, celebrated by a company
of girls who sang and danced before dawn, hung garlands on the goddess’s
holy plane-tree, and poured olive oil on the ground at its foot. This is securely
inferred from Theocritus’ eighteenth Idyll, which after a narrative introduc-
tion presents an epithalamium supposedly sung and danced by the original
girl chorus. Helen will be Menelaos’ bride ‘from year to year’ (15). Her beauty
is compared with Dawn and spring (26 f.). The girls are going to the meadows
before first light to gather flowers (39 f.); they will return at dawn, when the
bridal pair are due to awake (55–7). The girls who celebrated the festival in
historical times identified themselves with Helen’s friends and coevals, much
as the girl votaries of the Leukippides were themselves called Leukippides
(Paus. 3. 16. 1), and the Latvian celebrants of the Sun maiden’s wedding
became Sun maidens themselves.
In Rhodes the story was told that Helen was seized there by a group of
women dressed as Erinyes and hanged from a tree, in memory of which there
(^131) Mannhardt (1875), 77 nos. 13–15, 85 no. 83; LD 33802 var. 1, 33804 = Jonval nos. 359, 358.
(^132) Mannhardt (1905), i. 156–82; Frazer (1911–36), ii. 59–70.
(^133) von Schroeder (1914–16), ii. 122–4. My rendering of the song is based on his German
translations of versions communicated to him by ‘Frau Direktor A. Feldt in Libau’; they are
variants of LD 32865 = Jonval no. 165.
(^134) LD 33758 = Jonval no. 375; Schleicher (1857), 221 no. 12.
(^135) von Schroeder (1914–16), ii. 432 f.
- Sun and Daughter 235