marycatelli (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marycatelli) wrote2013-02-07 07:55 pm
marycatelli) wrote2013-02-07 07:55 pm
fin, out, up, down -- across
Matrimony can have some interesting requirements, which tend to get short shrift in fiction.
Part of it is nowadays, you expect to marry freely with minimal requirements. Not in a certain group (endogamy), or up or down (hypergamy for the one marrying up), or across (isogamy). Requirements were rather sterner in older days.
Fairy tales tend to treat marrying up with casual abandon, with peasant's daughters, woodcutter's sons, old soldiers, merely noble daughters, managing to marry kings or princes or princesses. Though there's an entire group of fairy tales where there is a prophecy that a poor man's son will marry a king's daughter, or sometimes just a merchant's, and the father-in-law-to-be goes to great efforts to prevent it. And of course, the king is prone to react to the stupid third son of some peasant by throwing up more obstacles. To be sure, they always fail and are always treated as rather like fools. . . though in literary fairy tales, it can actually pull more weight. The Facetious Nights of Straparola has a tale where a late-born princess, in spite of having no land dowry because her father the king had divided his estate between his three older daughters as their dowry before she was born, nevertheless assures him that she will never disgrace her blood.
Well, that was only one tale, to be sure. In others, people marry up. Madame d'Aulnoy was made of sterner stuff. Even when she was retelling a fairy tale like The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird (as Princess Belle-Etoile) or combining Cinderella and Hop O'My Thumb (as Finette Cendron), where the heroine had to be in a lowly position up front, she figured out ways to make the poverty-stricken family royal.
Madame d'Aulony also had a surprising tendency to make them first cousins. Though not as impressively as the first author of Beauty and the Beast, who made Beauty and the Beast double first cousins. To be sure, being royal, they could probably have gotten dispensations. When the Church was promulgating very wide restrictions on the marriages of cousins, one French king was praised for having obeyed it by the expedient of lowering himself to marry a mere noblewoman. In ancien regime times and the nineteenth century, that would have gotten a colder treatment. Queen Victoria got complaints that she allowed princes and princesses to marry the offspring of morgantic marriages, and would scold back that if she thought them appropriate, who was anyone else to disagree? (She even let a daughter marry a subject.) Then, one thing she also wrote about was the immense desirability of getting some brown-eyed blood into the blue-eyed royal family.
Inbreeding was, after all, a known consequence of closer intermarriage. Though the dangers are much exaggerated. Even closer than cousins, most children turned out all right, and many cultures swing it. Plato's Laws take for granted that any heiress will be rapidly married off to her nearest male cousin, and when it's occasional, it can be fine. It's intensive, continual intermarriage over generations that really brings out the genetic problems.
Then, some writers treat it as the sole danger, so all incest taboos are based on it. This is obviously impossible because relationships are frequently not prohibited on the degree of consanguinity. Many cultures forbid parallel cousins (children of brothers or sisters) from marrying -- no matter how distantly, in China for instance you can't marry anyone of the same last name -- while actually preferring cross cousins (children of a brother and sister). There are also forms of incest that do not involve consanguinity at all. Affinity is the commonest; you may not be able to marry your stepparent (or child), your sibling-in-law, your parent (or child) in law. Puritan New England argued, from "one flesh" that a married couple were now related to each other's family exactly as the spouse had been, and so marrying your dead wife's cousin was no different from marrying your own cousin (And not just for marriage. One women was sent a letter with greetings for "your brother John" -- where John was her husband's dead first wife's sister's husband.)
Saint Augustine thought that it sprang from the need to force people into new relationships. By marrying a woman who was not his sister, a man would acquire a father-in-law he wasn't related to, instead of merely making his father his father-in-law as well. (Yes, that was the relationship he suggested. Tells you something about family relations back then.) He certainly has a point that incest taboos serve to structure society, especially in cultures where ties of blood and marriage matter.
Other cultures had other requirements. Castes in India might have other castes, frequently inferior, from which they choose their brides. British writers reported that some castes that killed their daughters did so to avoid marrying them off, sometimes just for expense, but sometimes because they would have to marry down. European royal daughters frequently had to remain unmarried because their fathers were unable to find a suitable equal marriage. And many impoverished patricians went to marry off their sons to the wealthy upstart's daughters, rather than the other way round. (Though it was not, to be sure, unknown. One study of German men raised to the nobility during the nineteenth century found that most had either a noble wife or a noble mother.)
Part of it is nowadays, you expect to marry freely with minimal requirements. Not in a certain group (endogamy), or up or down (hypergamy for the one marrying up), or across (isogamy). Requirements were rather sterner in older days.
Fairy tales tend to treat marrying up with casual abandon, with peasant's daughters, woodcutter's sons, old soldiers, merely noble daughters, managing to marry kings or princes or princesses. Though there's an entire group of fairy tales where there is a prophecy that a poor man's son will marry a king's daughter, or sometimes just a merchant's, and the father-in-law-to-be goes to great efforts to prevent it. And of course, the king is prone to react to the stupid third son of some peasant by throwing up more obstacles. To be sure, they always fail and are always treated as rather like fools. . . though in literary fairy tales, it can actually pull more weight. The Facetious Nights of Straparola has a tale where a late-born princess, in spite of having no land dowry because her father the king had divided his estate between his three older daughters as their dowry before she was born, nevertheless assures him that she will never disgrace her blood.
Next - speaking with all submission and reverence - I do not purpose to let myself fall be low the race of my ancestors, who from all time have been famous and illustrious, nor do I wish to debase the crown you wear by taking for a husband one who is our inferior. You, my beloved father, have begotten four daughters, of whom you have married three in the most honourable fashion to three mighty kings, giving with them great store of gold and wide domains, but you wish to dispose of me, who have ever been obedient to you and observant of your precepts, in an ignoble alliance. Wherefore I tell you, to end my speech, that I will never take a husband unless I can be mated, like my three sisters, to a king of a rank that is my due
Well, that was only one tale, to be sure. In others, people marry up. Madame d'Aulnoy was made of sterner stuff. Even when she was retelling a fairy tale like The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird (as Princess Belle-Etoile) or combining Cinderella and Hop O'My Thumb (as Finette Cendron), where the heroine had to be in a lowly position up front, she figured out ways to make the poverty-stricken family royal.
Madame d'Aulony also had a surprising tendency to make them first cousins. Though not as impressively as the first author of Beauty and the Beast, who made Beauty and the Beast double first cousins. To be sure, being royal, they could probably have gotten dispensations. When the Church was promulgating very wide restrictions on the marriages of cousins, one French king was praised for having obeyed it by the expedient of lowering himself to marry a mere noblewoman. In ancien regime times and the nineteenth century, that would have gotten a colder treatment. Queen Victoria got complaints that she allowed princes and princesses to marry the offspring of morgantic marriages, and would scold back that if she thought them appropriate, who was anyone else to disagree? (She even let a daughter marry a subject.) Then, one thing she also wrote about was the immense desirability of getting some brown-eyed blood into the blue-eyed royal family.
Inbreeding was, after all, a known consequence of closer intermarriage. Though the dangers are much exaggerated. Even closer than cousins, most children turned out all right, and many cultures swing it. Plato's Laws take for granted that any heiress will be rapidly married off to her nearest male cousin, and when it's occasional, it can be fine. It's intensive, continual intermarriage over generations that really brings out the genetic problems.
Then, some writers treat it as the sole danger, so all incest taboos are based on it. This is obviously impossible because relationships are frequently not prohibited on the degree of consanguinity. Many cultures forbid parallel cousins (children of brothers or sisters) from marrying -- no matter how distantly, in China for instance you can't marry anyone of the same last name -- while actually preferring cross cousins (children of a brother and sister). There are also forms of incest that do not involve consanguinity at all. Affinity is the commonest; you may not be able to marry your stepparent (or child), your sibling-in-law, your parent (or child) in law. Puritan New England argued, from "one flesh" that a married couple were now related to each other's family exactly as the spouse had been, and so marrying your dead wife's cousin was no different from marrying your own cousin (And not just for marriage. One women was sent a letter with greetings for "your brother John" -- where John was her husband's dead first wife's sister's husband.)
Saint Augustine thought that it sprang from the need to force people into new relationships. By marrying a woman who was not his sister, a man would acquire a father-in-law he wasn't related to, instead of merely making his father his father-in-law as well. (Yes, that was the relationship he suggested. Tells you something about family relations back then.) He certainly has a point that incest taboos serve to structure society, especially in cultures where ties of blood and marriage matter.
Other cultures had other requirements. Castes in India might have other castes, frequently inferior, from which they choose their brides. British writers reported that some castes that killed their daughters did so to avoid marrying them off, sometimes just for expense, but sometimes because they would have to marry down. European royal daughters frequently had to remain unmarried because their fathers were unable to find a suitable equal marriage. And many impoverished patricians went to marry off their sons to the wealthy upstart's daughters, rather than the other way round. (Though it was not, to be sure, unknown. One study of German men raised to the nobility during the nineteenth century found that most had either a noble wife or a noble mother.)
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A surprising number of teachers boil it down to this, probably because it's easy to defend. (Horribly inaccurate in almost all portrayals, as you pointed out-- but defensible, especially with folk genetics.)
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Hm.
Thinking on it a bit more, possibly the folks further back were more familiar with applied genetics? Crossbred Vigor is not exactly obscure; you breed your stock for some traits, and then bring in a totally different line that has similar traits every couple of generations for best results.
My folks breed cows; their replacements all come from among the daughters of the herd.* 15 years ago, they switched to only certified Black Angus, with the largely-angus-but-also-a-lot-of-other-stuff stock. About five years ago, they started to worry about finally losing the hybrid vigor-- given their druthers, they'd start buying Hereford bulls for one reproductive cycle. Only partly because there are very few things cuter than a little herford calf... I'd even pit them against the random fluke of a red Angus.
In contrast, my mom does AI work for some very smart people who don't even think about the genetics of what they're doing. They'd breed daughter and granddaughter and great granddaughter (and, I think, three more generations now--not sure what calves were female the last several years) on the same bull, just because they don't think about where the straws came from, they just ordered a bunch of straws on whatever-the-heck breed they wanted years ago.
So, to kind of reach a point, if you assume fairly closed human populations, even out-breeding is less of a good idea if your mother married an outsider....
Then again, the not-as-big-a-good-the-second-generation-in-a-row isn't exactly a good reason to forbid something, while the issue of really bad recessive genes is.
*It's actually pretty slick-- when the replacements are two, they're bred with the newest bulls, who are smallest; those calves are almost never kept, and rare exceptions are easy to track and just AI.
Next year, the bulls go to one of the other breeding groups, and are usually sold the year their daughters would cycle into the general population. Not just for genetic reasons, but also because the bulls just keep growing and they can eventually hurt the cows. Different ranchers tend to a different size of cow.
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On a practical level, wouldn't it depend almost entirely on the author's "Just So"? Either have a bunch of monster species, or only a few with a wide range of variations, or the ever popular A Wizard Did It.... (I can't see how a cat/bird and a lizard/bat would viably cross, but if they were actually just different corners of adaptation, the feathers vs scales thing would work alright...though I can't think of a species with THAT extreme of a variation in reality.)
By comparison, elf/human/dwarf is no problem, unless you go with the plant/animal/rock setup.
Went with the traditional origin for a basilisk, though-- thankfully. The idea of a breeding population of THOSE is scary.
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There's a good scene in the midst of Xanth where Dor is commenting on how their neat models of magic have broken from collision with reality.
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In fact, throughout Shakespeare people refer to their spouses' siblings as brother or sister.
Probably the influence of the Puritains.
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If you did think so, you didn't say so in a play in her time.