132 KINDRED GROUP-MARRIAGE 



queen or tribal mother in the heroic age ; also in Edda, 

 the house-mother, with which M.H.G. eide, a mother, 

 may be compared. Wackernagel even suggests a 

 possible relation to Sanskrit udara and Latin uterus, 

 the womb ( Worterbuch, p. 324), so that the value of 

 the root would then carry us back to the kin or gan 

 conception of woman. 



(4) It will be seen that the hi or heg stratum of 

 fossils has led us to reconstruct a social system very dif- 

 ferent from the patriarchal, and we can strengthen this 

 conception by two most interesting words which I have 

 reserved to the last. These are O.H.G. hileih and hirdt. 

 I have already pointed out the part which the old common 

 meal, the common talk or council, and the choral dance 

 accompanying the sex-festival played in the old group 

 life. Tacitus tells us that the Germans of his day met 

 to take a clan meal, to settle clan business i.e. for the 

 clan council and to arrange marriages. He also tells 

 us of the dances of the same tribes. He did not grasp 

 the real meaning of this combination of offices ; it was 

 merely a reflex of the old group life which I have 

 endeavoured to illustrate to the reader, and which finds 

 strong confirmation in hileih and Mrdt. 



Leich is a choral song, but one which Weinhold tells 

 us was in the oldest German period invariably accom- 

 panied by dancing. Hileih is, then, the choral dance 

 which preceded or accompanied the hijen or sex-festival. 

 Ulfilas uses laikan for the Greek o-Kiprdw, which our 

 Bible translators render by ' leap for joy.' In the case 

 of the Prodigal Son, Ulfilas puts laikins for %o/>wz^, a per- 

 fect equivalent from the standpoint of the sex-festival. 



