Cranz says that in Greenland “some females, when a husband is proposed to them will fall into a swoon, elope to a desert place, or cut off their hair.... In the latter case they are seldom troubled with further addresses.” The refractory bride is dragged
forcibly into her suitor’s house, where she sits for several days disconsolate, with dishevelled hair, and refuses nourishment. When friendly exhortations are unavailing, she is compelled by force and even with blows to receive her husband. Should she elope, she is brought back and treated more harshly than before.[117]
[117] _History of Greenland_, vol. i., p. 146.
Wherever friendly relations have been established between the tribe of the wife and that of the husband, he pays a price to her relatives for the privilege of removing her to his camp. This purchase price, together with the simulated hatred of the woman’s friends, signifies a sacrifice on the part of the wife and her family. In Nubia when a man marries he presents his wife with a wedding-dress, and gives her also a pledge for three or four hundred piastres, half of which sum is paid her in case of a divorce. Divorces, however, are very rare.[118]
[118] Burckhardt, _Travels in Nubia_, p. 34.
Among the Circassians, after the preliminaries have been settled by the parents, the lover meets his bride-elect by night in some secluded spot, and with the assistance of two or three of his best friends seizes her and carries her away. Sometimes the pretended capture takes place in the midst of a noisy feast. The woman is usually conducted into the presence of a mutual friend, where, on the following day, her friends, simulating anger, seek her and demand a reason for her abduction. Although the affair is usually settled at once by the bridegroom paying the accustomed price for his bride, custom requires that there shall be still further manifestations of anger on the part of her friends; so, on the following day, all the relatives of the bride, armed with sticks, proceed to the place where the bride is in waiting, there to meet the bridegroom and his friends who have come to carry off the bride. A sham fight ensues, in which the bridegroom and his party are always victorious. Among certain of the Arabian tribes the bridegroom must force his bride to enter his tent, and in France, as late as the seventeenth century, a similar custom prevailed.