o be felt that
this was an unusual proceeding; otherwise it would have been needless to
plead with the lady to return, and to extend a special invitation to
those whom she would not abandon: an indication, this, that the story
has been adapted to a higher plane of civilization, in which it was no
longer the custom for the husband to go and dwell among his wife's
people.[204]

On the other hand, Andrianoro's wife lives under patriarchal government.
The Malagasy have advanced further on the path of civilization than the
Maories; and at the stage of progress they have reached, the father is
much more like an absolute monarch. In the story referred to, the lady
had married without her father's consent. Accordingly her marriage is
ignored, and her lover has to perform a number of services for his
father-in-law, and so purchase formal consent to their union. Nor will
it escape the reader that when the wielder of the thunderbolt at last
gives his daughter to her husband, he dismisses them back to the home of
the latter. Hasan, too, it will be remembered, returns to Bagdad with
his wife and children, though we probably have a survival of an older
form of the story in his relations with her redoubtable sister. This
lady holds a position impossible in an Arab kingdom. Her father is a
mere shadow, hardly mentioned but to save appearances; so much more
substantial is her power and her opposition to the match. The variants
of the Marquis of the Sun are found chiefly among European nations,[205]
whose history, institutions, and habits of thought lead them to attach
great value to paternal authority. In the tasks performed in _maerchen_
of this type, and the precipitate flight which usually takes place on
the wedding night from the ogre's secret wrath, it would seem that we
have a reminiscence of the archaic institutions of marriage by purchase
and marriage by capture,--both alike incidents of the period when
mother-right (as the reckoning of descent solely through females is
called) has ceased to exist in a pure form, and society has passed, or
is passing, into the patriarchal stage. The Marquis of the Sun type is,
therefore, more recent than the other types of the Swan-maiden
tradition, none of which so uniformly in all their variants recognize
the father's supreme position.[206]

If the tasks and the flight be a reminiscence of purchase and capture,
we may find in that reminiscence a reason why nearly all the stories
concur in re