Anthropologists have always been interested in whether savage people experienced love and what kinds of courtship practices and sexual relationships they had.

In the 20th century, the studies of love in many remote tribal societies around the world have made a great progress thanks to cultural anthropology (see for review, Karandashev, 2017, 2019). However, we still don’t know much about how people lived, loved, and married in societies before modern civilizations.

Unfortunately, we don’t have much access to the evidence from past centuries. Yet, we are getting farther and farther away from the time when people lived like savages. Because of this, the fact that old archives of studies about love from the past are available is very helpful for love scholarship today. In the previous article, I briefly presented what kind of love was among savages of the past centuries.

Here we talk about courtship practices among savages, retrieved from the old archival treasures of love scholarship (Finck, 1887/2019).

What Were the Courtship Practices among Savages?

In the previous article, I cited several scholars of the past who contended that love was an unknown emotional experience for uncivilized savages. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that love didn’t exist at all among savages based on what some of the experts talked about. On the contrary, some “overtones” of love appeared from time to time in anthropological observations and travelers’ notes. Some of them provided arguments and indications that primitive people of the past might experience love.

Savage Love in Folklore

The folklore of the past centuries held legends and poems with love stories. For example, Theodor Waitz, a philosophy professor at the University of Marburg, studied romantic love among North Americans and other primitive peoples in the 19th century. He discovered in those primitive societies the legends of Lovers’ Leaps and Maiden Rocks, and a poem telling the story of a South American maiden who committed suicide on her lover’s grave. She did so to avoid falling into the hands of the Spaniards. (Finck, 1887/2019, Waitz, 1863)

Such legends and poems cannot be counted as scientific evidence of what primitive people of the past experienced in their lives.

Savage Love in Life

Savages of the past in some tribal societies and cultural contexts of the world might experience and express emotions and actions that resemble “love.”

For example, “mischievous amourettes sometimes do flit across the field of vision. For the goddess of Love is ever watchful of an opportunity for one of her emissaries to bag some game.” (Finck, 1887/2019, p. 57).

We should admit, however, that full-fledged cupids might never appear with their poisoned arrows in primitive cultures.

Modern scholarship commonly associates romantic relationships with courtship. It’s interesting to see how old primitive tribes handled courtship.

What Was the “Capture” Type of Courtship? The “capture” was the widely prevalent custom of exogamy, or marrying out. It is a curious feature of savage life.

“This custom compels a man who wishes a wife of his own to steal or purchase her of another tribe, private marriage within his own tribe being considered criminal and even punishable with death.”

(Finck, 1887/2019, p. 57).

This rule of exogamy might be the origin of monogamy:

“Women were at first, like other kinds of property, held in common by the tribe, any man being any woman’s husband ad libitum. No man could therefore claim a woman for himself without infringing on the rights of others. But if he stole a woman from another tribe, she became his exclusive property, which he had a right to guard jealously, and to look upon with the Pride of Conquest—a pride, however, quite distinct from that which intoxicates a civilised lover when he finds, or fondly imagines, that his goddess has chosen him among all his rivals. The primitive man’s pride is more like that of the warrior who wears a large number of scalps in his belt; and as in his case marriage immediately follows Capture, this feeling, moreover, belongs more properly to the sphere of conjugal sentiment than to that of Love.”

(Finck, 1887/2019, p. 57).

From this description, one can see that this primitive form of courtship is much ruder than that which prevails in the animal kingdom. Among animals, the males alone maltreat one another. In this early human form of courtship, if the woman resists, she is “simply knocked on the head, and her senseless body carried off to the captor’s tent.” (Finck, 1887/2019, p. 57).

Three Examples of the “Wife-capture” Courtship

Diefenbach, Tylor, and Waitz described their anthropological examples of this practice (quoted in Finck, 1887/2019, p. 57).

Diefenbach wrote about Polynesians:

“If a girl was courted by two suitors, each of them grasped one arm of the beloved and pulled her toward him; the stronger one got her, but in some cases not before her limbs had been pulled out of joint.”

Tylor wrote about the fierce forest tribes in Brazil:

“Ancient tradition knows this practice well, as where the men of Benjamin carry off the daughters of Shiloh dancing at the feast, and in the famous Roman tale of the rape of the Sabines, a legend putting in historical form the wife-capture which in Roman custom remained as a ceremony. What most clearly shows what a recognised old-world custom it was, is its being thus kept up as a formality where milder manners really prevailed. It had passed into this state among the Spartans, when Plutarch says that though the marriage was really by friendly settlement between the families, the bridegroom’s friends went through the pretence of carrying off the bride by violence. Within a few generations the same old habit was kept up in Wales, where the bridegroom and his friends, mounted and armed as for war, carried off the bride; and in Ireland they used even to hurl spears at the bride’s people, though at such a distance that no one was hurt, except now and then by accident, as happened when one Lord Howth lost an eye, which mischance seems to have put an end to this curious relic of antiquity.”

Waitz commented that

“the girls were commonly abducted by force, which led frequently to most violent fights, in which the girl herself was occasionally wounded, or even killed, to prevent her from falling into the hands of the enemy.”

The Historically Later Forms of “Wife-capture”

As Henry Finck noted, in the advanced age of the 19th century, “elopement” became the name for the modified form of “wife-capture.”

“When the parents dissent and the couple are very young, this climax of courtship doubtless is often reprehensible. But in those cases where the consent of all parties has been obtained, it ought to be universally adopted. Sudden flight and an impromptu marriage would add much to the romance of the honeymoon, and would enable the bridal couple to avoid the terrors and stupid formalities of the wedding-day, the anticipation of which is doubtless responsible for the ever-increasing number of cowardly bachelors in the world.”

(Finck, 1887/2019, p. 58).