Fosterage, Kinship, and Legend: When Milk Was Thicker than

Fosterage, Kinship, and Legend:When Milk Was Thicker than Blood?PETER PARKES

University of Kent

“Le lait va aussi loin que le sang!” dit un vieux proverbe Ossétien (Kovalevsky 1893:213).

“Milk is more significant that rod [agnation] . . . it lasts forever” (Filipovic 1982:131–33).

“Fostering is two-thirds of a child’s nature” (Irish proverb, cited in Gwynn 1913:106–7).

When social ties are put to the test, proverbs affirm, those of consanguinity usu-ally prevail: “Blood is thicker than water”; or as Arabs put it, “Blood is thick-er than milk” (Lane 1893:1097). These enigmatic adages refer to former insti-tutions of adoptive kinship in western Eurasia, contrasting the blood of natalkinship with the water of baptism or “spiritual kinship” in Christendom, andwith infant fosterage or “milk kinship” in Islam.1 Other sayings, cited asepigraphs above, argue that the nurture of such adoptive kinship may match orsupersede natal kinship, just as baptismal sponsorship was supposed to createa spiritual cognation superior to that of mere flesh and blood (Gudeman 1972;Guerreau-Jalabert 1995).

Ritual kinship and milk kinship have comparable and connected social his-tories in western Eurasia, which were examined in earlier essays in this journal(Parkes 2001; 2003). But while Christian godparenthood has been well ex-plored in symbolic ethnography (Fine 1994; Héritier-Augé and Copet-Rougier1995), the significance of infant fosterage seems poorly documented (cf. Khat-

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Acknowledgments: I am most grateful to Jan Bremmer, whose longstanding scholarship on fos-terage has been a major inspiration and referential resource. I am also indebted to Nick Allen,Sheila Boll, and Gene Hammel for detailed comments and corrections; to anonymous reviewersof CSSH, and to Tom Trautmann and David Akin for editorial assistance. This essay was writtenduring academic study leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, United King-dom. The Faculty of Social Science of the University of Kent awarded a grant for translation ofInal-Ipa (1956).

1 On this broad (non-jural) usage of adoptive kinship for familial relations created by pro-par-enthood, see Parkes (2003: 744). Reference to christening water in the English proverb is record-ed from the eighteenth century, although the saying has obscure (possibly Gaelic) origins before itsmention in John Ray’s English Proverbs of 1670. On Arab milk kinship counterposed with ritualor sacrificial blood-kinship, see Robertson Smith (1885: 48).

ib-Chahidi 1992; Corbier 1999). Its ethnographic neglect may be due to itswidespread modern demise as an institution of clientage. But its former signif-icance may be retrieved from accounts of peripheral regions of western Eura-sia where allegiance fosterage persisted until recent times.2 Legendary narra-tives also indicate its former prevalence as a tributary relationship, highlightingits moral predicaments as a politically entangled construction of kinship.

cuckold kinship

In his social history of child abandonment and fostering, John Boswell (1988:84f.) alluded to a common disparaging metaphor for such adoptive kinship: thecuckoo’s alien nesting of its eggs. From antiquity, the cuckoo became em-blematic of a perverted kind of parentage, elaborated in allegorical bestiaries(Mannhardt1858) and riddling verse about abuses of fosterage as “cuckold kin-ship” (Crawford 1999:124–25). Notoriously, the “ingrate cuckoo” was sup-posed ultimately to devour its attendant nurse and adoptive siblings (Hardy1879:64–65; see, e.g., Shakespeare’s King Lear I, iv, l. 235). Colonial dispar-agements of allegiance fosterage recurrently evoked this ancient avian imageryof perverted parentage. Gerald of Wales, whose twelfth-century diatribesagainst the evils of Irish and Welsh fostering are well known (Parkes 2003:755), thus decried “the cuckoo who would devour his foster-parents when ful-ly grown” (Speculum duorum, ed. Richter 1974:6), doubtless alluding to Welshcustomary inheritance of peasant farmholdings by noble fosterlings (Smith1992:21). Eight centuries later, Colonel Reginald Schomberg wryly observedhow, in the Hindu Kush, “foster-parents continually show great devotion andabnegation to this cuckoo [sc. princely fosterling] in their nest, and their ownchildren suffer” (1938:226; cf. Parkes 2001:12, 26).

Colonial abhorrence of cliental fosterage and its “unnatural ties” of cuckoldkinship was vividly expressed in a royal report submitted to James I by the At-torney-General of Ireland, Sir John Davies (1612). Fosterage, together withgossipred or spiritual kinship, was one of “two customs proper and peculiar tothe Irishry, which being the cause of many strong combinations and factions,do tend to the utter ruin of a commonwealth”:

[T]hey put away all their children to fosterers, the potent and the rich men selling, themeaner sort buying the alterage [fostering, Irish altram] of their children. And the rea-son is because in the opinion of this people fostering hath always been a stronger al-liance than blood, and the foster-children do love and are beloved of their foster-fathersand their sept more than of their own natural parents and kindred, and do participate oftheir means more frankly, and do adhere unto them in all fortunes with more affectionand constancy . . . The like may be said of gossipred or compaternity (Davies 1612 inMorley, 1890:296–97).

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2 On such allegiance fosterage, distinguishable from the “crisis fostering” of orphans by closekin, see Parkes (2003: 743f., after E. Goody 1982 on “alliance fosterage”).

Like Gerald of Wales, Sir John Davies recognized the anarchic implications ofadoptive kinship in instigating factional coalitions and conspiracies:

Now, these two customs [fostering and gossipred] become exceedingly evil and full ofmischief in this realm . . . For they made strong parties and factions, whereby the greatmen were enabled to oppress their inferiors and to oppose their equals; and their fol-lowers were borne out and countenanced in all their lewd and wicked actions. For fos-terers and gossips, by the common custom of Ireland, were to maintain one another inall causes lawful and unlawful, which, as it is in a combination and confederacy pun-ishable in all well-governed commonweals, so was it not one of the least causes of thecommon misery of this kingdom (Ibid.).

Sir John Davies was one of the main architects of the English juridical disman-tling of Irish traditional states in the seventeenth century (Pawlisch 1988). Hisdenigration of their “barbarous” and “unnatural” customs was therefore de-signed to justify his own radical plans for Ireland’s imperial reformation, just asGerald of Wales had earlier staked moral claims to colonization with an identi-cal disparagement of Celtic fosterage (cf. Gillingham 1992). But despite theirideological motivation, these colonial opinions were not ungrounded in obser-vation (Fitzsimons 2001). Tributary factions of adoptive kin did seem to have anaffinity with instabilities of dynastic succession in segmentary states, albeit con-solidating power once succession was secured (Parkes 2003:760). Nor was suchfosterage invariably condemned in colonial imagination. Some English ob-servers, such as Edmund Campion in the sixteenth century, rather admired howthe Irish “love tenderly their fosterchildren, and bequeathe to them a childes por-tion whereby they nourish sure friendshippe, so beneficial in every way, thatcommonly five hundredth kyne and better are given in reward to winne a no-bleman’s childe to foster” (“A History of Ireland” [1571] in Ware 1809:19).

Colonial denigration of fosterage may also be matched by its troubled in-digenous evaluation. Surveying its legendary representations in this essay, weshall observe a recurrent moral ambivalence surrounding its challenges to con-trary claims of consanguinity. Allegiances of foster-kinship might be romanti-cally valorized as emblems of secure trust in segmentary states of episodicallyviolent animosities, “whereby they nourish sure friendshippe.” Yet these dele-gated parental ties, like similar bonds of spiritual kinship, were recognized tobe compacts of a somewhat fictitious filiation between disparate ranks. Theymight even encourage exploitative social parasitism and treachery towardsone’s natal kind, when “preferring their foster-children and milk-siblings(alumnos et collactaneos), they would persecute their own brothers and cog-nate kin ( fratres et cognatos)” (Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica Dist.III, c. 23; ed. Dimock 1867:167–68). Fealty and treachery, natural sociality andunnatural allegiance, incest and kin-slaying—these emerge as recurrent motifsin the narrative symbolism of tributary fosterage:

All who have suck’d the same breasts are very kind and loving, and confide more in eachother than if they were natural brothers, so that they will have an aversion even to their

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own brothers for the sake of these (William Good “Descriptions and Customs of the WildIrish” in Camden 1722, ii:1418).

The foster-brothers—I mean the children of the nurse and strangers that have suckedher milk—love one another better than natural brothers, and hate them in respect of theother . . . and some oppose their own brothers to death that they might save their foster-brothers from dangers thereof (Fynes Moryson’s “Itinerary” [1592] in Falkiner 1904:318).

milk and blood: ATALYK fosterage in abkhazia

Infant fosterage in premodern Eurasia was commonly identified with consan-guineal kinship created by suckling breastmilk, as is still recognized in Islam-ic law.3 Although pre-Christian milk kinship was supplanted by later child fos-terage in medieval western Europe (Strauch 1980), its traditional idiom ofinfant nourishment long persisted, as did the original institution of cliental in-fant fostering and milk kinship in southeast Europe (Parkes n.d.b). Its social andsymbolic significance is well documented in historical ethnographies of theCaucasus (Parkes 2003:751–53). In the Christian statelet of Abkhazia, on theeastern shore of the Black Sea, an exceptionally detailed ethnography was com-piled by Shalva Inal-Ipa (1956), documenting personal testimonies of atalykmilk kinship and foster-tutelage, which survived as a traditional institution intothe early decades of the twentieth century.

Abkhazians considered kinship created by delegated suckling fully equiva-lent to consanguinity. As Aristotle and Galen had supposed, breastmilk wasthought to be a purified refinement of a woman’s uterine blood.4 Breastmilkand natal blood were therefore conceptually equated as consubstantial; but theywere also symbolically counterposed. Abkhazians declared, “There is no pow-er stronger than mother’s milk,” which could “wash clean” enmities of blood-feud. Village exogamy was even thought to safeguard communities against“profaning the breastmilk,” reminiscent of Aristotle’s notion of natural com-munities (koinonia) being constituted by common milk kinship (homogalak-tes).5 Moral obligations were sanctified in this ritual idiom of “sacred breast-

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3 On Islamic milk kinship, see references in Parkes (2003: 746–51) and Parkes (n.d.a; also En-sel 2002). Cf. Dixon (1999: 221) on ancient Roman fosterage: “The root meaning of fostering in-heres in the relation of feeding at the breast of someone other than the mother . . . The relationshipwas generally one of patronage, but cast in terms of quasi-kinship between people of unequal so-cial standing.”

4 Aristotle De generatione animalium IV.viii. Milk’s derivation from a woman’s uterine blood,conveyed by veins linking the womb to the breasts, was a widespread Eurasian notion, also foundin Arab medicine (Giladi 1999), thus underpinning both Islamic and eastern Christian canonicalreckonings of milk kinship (Parkes n.d.a; Benkheira 2001). Its implications for breastfeeding anddelegated nursing are detailed in the Gynecology of Soranus of Ephesus (Temkin, ed. 1956: 88–101).

5 Aristotle Politics I: 1252. Attic homogalaktes was plausibly interpreted as an archaic term ofmilk kinship by Wilamowitz (1889: 57, n.16). For further discussion, including its gloss by Philo-chorus and Pollux, see Jacoby (1954 I: 321–23, II: 231), Hammond (1961: 79–80), and Derks

milk,” by which oaths of loyalty were sworn. Fostered wards were expected togive lifelong protection to their atalyk fosterers, who conversely offered theirlives in prosecuting the internecine feuds of their noble milk-brothers and milk-sons (Inal-Ipa 1956:80–86, 107–111; Benet 1974:57–58).

This ideal collaboration among milk kin was, however, subject to ambiva-lent reflection. Abkhazian oral histories recounted tragic treacheries amongmilk-brothers, as well as gross abuses of trust, including incestuous “profana-tion of the breast” committed by fostered lords on their kinswomen by milk.Inal-Ipa comments: “With this so-called ‘mutual assistance’ [of milk kin] inbloodfeuds, as in all similar affairs, the side of the good old atalyk fosterer, be-ing peasantry, suffered incomparably more, as one might expect” (1956:102).Blood debts of vengeance among nobility could be exacted on their peasant fos-ter-kin as proxy victims. Yet disparities of rank entailed disparities of vengeanceand compensation among milk kin, belying a supposed reciprocity of mutualobligation created by sacred breastmilk: “If a prince killed a peasant, then thekin of the latter had no rights of blood vengeance; for as they said, ‘The bloodof a peasant is not worth the blood of a prince.’ And so, in place of a murder-ous prince, his atalyk fosterer had to answer for the blood he had spilled” (ibid.).Just as Schomberg had reported grumbling resentments of vassal fosterers inthe Hindu Kush—where “foster-brothers have spent all their substance on someuseless brat of the aristocratic class, and in return have received no recompense,no gratitude, and no protection” (1938:225)—it may be indicative that the Ab-khazian term akhupka for a fostered ward was proverbial for an overindulgedingrate. An obnoxious visitor would be told: “You allow yourself a lot of liber-ties, just as if you were our akhupka [fosterling]” (Benet 1974:58).

Abkhazian milk kinship could be extended by symbolic suckling at thebreast, incorporating adults as well as infants, with identical moral obligationsand impediments on marriage to those created through infant fosterage. Ritualadoption by token suckling or “breast-biting” (akHukatshara) was employed todefuse suspicions of adultery or to create conciliatory milk kinship after blood-feud. It was also used to create reciprocal bond-partnerships, with a mutual “bit-ing of the breast” of one or both of the adoptive brothers’ mothers, and occa-sionally of their own male nipples, as also occurred in the Hindu Kush (Inal-Ipa1956:72f.; cf. Parkes 2000:276). But such symbolic adoption was primarily de-ployed as a performative rite of fealty between peasant and lord, the latter as-suming the role of akhupka fosterling, and so receiving “his share” of tributeand labor services in a kinship idiom of foster-prestations. Collective vassalageby “breast-biting” adoption would be undertaken by whole village communi-ties with regional bailiffs, allied by real or symbolic milk kinship to feudatoryoverlords, who were allied in turn as fosterers and milk kin to ruling princes


(1995). Modern Greek omoghalaktes is noted by Kenna (2001: 89) as an extant term for milk-sib-lingship by co-suckling in island Greece, where it is still treated as an impediment to marriage.

(Inal-Ipa 1956:74–75). Caucasian atalyk fosterage thus comprised a pervasivefeudatory network of tributary allegiances, similar to milk-kinship chains of dy-nastic fealty in the Hindu Kush (Parkes 2001). In both regions, milk-kinshipties were perpetuated by reiterated contracts of fosterage in each generation,treated as social “heirlooms” of hereditary vassalage or tenant service (Inal-Ipa1956:18).

Inal-Ipa’s ethnography of Abkhazian milk kinship also elucidates the narra-tive symbolism of infant fosterage elsewhere in western Eurasia. In an Old Irishtale of Fergus Mac Léti, for example, this legendary king of Ulster was said tobe instructed by leprechauns in their custom of “sucking at the nipple” as a token of submission (Binchy 1952:41–42). This rite is evinced in Old Irish say-ings treated by O’Brien (1938), which explain why cích “breast, nipple” becamesynonymous for “peace-treaty” and “friendship,” and why “breast-sucking”(sugere mammellas) refers to sworn loyalty in the Confession of St Patrick. Gri-court (1957) noticed other allusions to such symbolic suckling recurring in Irishhagiographies, suggesting that Celtic fosterage, like Norse fóstr-kinship, mayhave been once instituted as a form of tributary milk kinship comparable withatalyk fosterage in the Caucasus.6

fosterage and legend

Over seventy years ago, the French classicist Louis Gernet published an eru-dite essay, “Fosterage et légende” (1932), examining numerous instances ofsuch infant fosterage in the Homeric epics. A recurrent motif was that of thehero, such as Theseus, sent away at birth to be nursed and raised by maternalkin. Infant nursing of princes might be undertaken for their protection, as wasNestor, fostered at Gerenia before his return to rule at Pylos. Sometimes a lega-cy of heirlooms was deposited for the child to retrieve on maturity, such as thesword and boots deposited under a rock for Theseus. In legends of Attic kings,fostering by maternal kin might be concluded by epiklerate in-marriage, secur-ing succession from an avuncular fosterer and father-in-law (cf. Bremmer1983). Other Greek myths and legends simply related the “carrying” of heroesat birth to their appointed nurses, whose husbands would serve as the child’spedagogue: the mythical prototype of such foster-tutelage was the centaur Che-iron, who successively raised such heroes as Achilles as warrior, Actaeon as

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6 This is confirmed by Maier (1999). Provision for crib-clothes in the Cáin Íarraith laws indi-cates that early Irish fosterage was commonly inaugurated by infant nursing (Ó hInnse 1943:8f.;Kelly 1988:87), as is also attested in a late Elizabethan tract reported by Fitzsimons (2001; see n.21 below). Cf. Smith (1992: 11–12) on “placing upon the breast” in medieval Welsh fosterage;also Schultze (1936) and Strauch (1980) on early Germanic Milchbrüderschaft. On comparablemilk-kinship allegiance and dynastic fosterage in medieval Armenia, see Bedrosian (1984) andGadzhieva (1995) on atalyk fosterage and milk kinship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryDaghestan.

hunter, and Asclepios as healer (Fig. 1). Gernet concluded that infant fosteragemust have been institutionalized in archaic Greece.

Epigraphic analyses of funerary epitaphs—particularly among Greeks ofAsia Minor (Cameron 1939)—corroborate such delegation of infants to subor-dinate fosterers, creating ties of adoptive kinship (threptós, syntrophoi) appar-ently similar to those of Caucasian atalyk fosterage (cf. Nani 1944; Levick etal. 1988:xliv–lvi). Etruscan depictions of the mythical adoption by suckling ofan adult Hercules by the goddess Hera or Juno (Fig. 2) suggest milk kinshipsymbolically underpinning such fosterage, as was adduced by Josef Kohler(1905; cf. Deonna 1954:250–55; Renard 1964). Diodorus of Sicily, alluding tothis myth in the first century B.C., already supposed it to be an archaic Greekrite of adoptive parentage, noting that it was “a ceremony still in use amongbarbarians when they want to adopt a child” (Diodorus IV ch. 39.2).7 Gernet’sconclusions about infant fosterage in ancient Greece are also confirmed in a fur-ther narrative survey of legendary threptós fostering by Jan Bremmer (1999).


Figure 1. Achilles entrusted by his father Peleus to the fosterage of the centaur Cheiron. (Otherdepictions normally show the hero as a babe in arms.) 5th cent. BC red figure stamnos in the Muséede Louvre, Paris (G186). Illustration from Herman (1987:24, Fig. 1A)

7 Identical rites of symbolic adoption by suckling, typically associated with milk kinship, havebeen observed throughout the eastern Mediterranean: e.g., Baddeley (1940, I: 263) for Caucasians,Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Kurds; Granqvist (1947: 114) for Palestinian Arabs; Ciszewski(1897: 104–5) for Bulgarians; and Sant Cassia and Bada (1997: 147) for modern Greeks. Cf.Leclant (1951) and Roehrig (1990) on similar dynastic rites of suckling and milk kinship in ancientEgypt.

Oedipus Threptós: Foster-Kinship in Ancient Greek Legend

Gernet showed that ancient Greek legends of infant fosterage were preoccupiedwith predicaments of succession and alliance among ruling descent lines.Building on earlier scholarship that had focused on symbols of exposure andfosterage in legends relating to Oedipus (Comparetti 1867; Constans 1881;Robert 1915; cf. Nilsson 1922), Gernet suggested that fostering and adoptivekinship might have served as an effective strategy of heirship (cf. J. Goody1973), often securing succession by uterine filiation. Repeated allegiances ofcombined fosterage and marriage between royal descent lines were notable inAttic as well as Theban dynastic legends, and Gernet discerned related motifsof ambivalent hostility between mother’s father and daughter’s child. The lat-ter was typically exposed at birth—like Oedipus—before being accepted for

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Figure 2. The ritual suckling of Hercules (Hercle) by Hera or Juno (Uni), establishing the mor-tal hero’s apotheosis within the Olympian pantheon by milk kinship. Etruscan bronze mirror en-graving from Volterra in the Museo Archeologico, Florence (72740; see Monaco 1933). Illustra-tion from Deonna (1954:153, Planche VI, Fig. 9).

fosterage and succession, sometimes achieved by the fosterling’s ominouslypredicted murder of his mother’s father. For Gernet, such legends reflected an-cient rites of royal initiation and investiture by foster-adoption. A similarscheme of archetypal myths of fostering had been proposed by Luria (1927),subsequently elaborated in Vladimir Propp’s (1944) formulaic analysis ofOedipal myths and their medieval legacy in tales of Judas, Pope Gregory, andAndrew of Crete. Various kinds of incest and kin-slaying were motivated by thefated child’s exposure at birth—typically due to his own incestuous concep-tion—followed by his suckling and fosterage by animals, monsters, or socialoutcastes, his achievement of sovereignty by regicide, and his apotheosis as amiraculous god or repentant saint buried deep within the earth.8

Whatever the merits of Gernet and Propp’s reconstructions of former uterinesuccession (or matriliny), infant fosterage in ancient Greek legends did seem tobe associated with myths and rites of foundational sovereignty. It was also reg-ularly associated with morally ambivalent predicaments of incest and kin-slay-ing, equally attested in Roman legends of Romulus (Bremmer 1987b:26–30).Propp’s prototypical Oedipal motifs—the infant exposure and fosterage of a future ruler, often raised by humble shepherds or blacksmiths, as by supernat-ural spirits or animals—have since been shown to comprise a widespreadEurasian mythology of divine sovereignty, as exhaustively demonstrated in TheSargon Legend by Brian Lewis (1980).9 As one might expect, these Oedipalpredicaments also recur in heroic legends of Abkhazians and their neighbors inthe Caucasus, who similarly practiced atalyk fosterage and milk kinship.

The Sasruquo Complex: Legendary Milk Kinship in the Caucasus

Legends of the Caucasus primarily concern the heroic exploits of the Narts, amythical generation of divine brothers born to the goddess Satanay (Dumézil1930; 1965; Colarusso 2002). Most admired was the lastborn Nart, Sasruquo.Miraculously conceived from a rock—by an incestuous union of Satanay withher paternal cousin Bataraz—Sasruquo was shortly sent into fosterage:

Unable to be nursed by his appointed foster-mothers due to his preternatural heat, Sas-ruquo was nourished on molten iron by the divine blacksmith Aynar, who thence be-comes the hero’s foster-father and initiator. He is even tempered in the smith’s forge,rendering his body almost invincible. Later mocked as a bastard by his Nart brothers (or


8 On these Oedipal legends, see Edmunds (1985) and Bremmer (1987a), together with the arti-cles collected in Edmunds and Dundes (1983). On “fosterage and avunculate,” see Bremmer (1976;1983), who makes a plausible case for fostering by matrilateral kin as a common Indo-Europeaninstitution (cf. Jaski 1999: 28–30), entailing clientage and/or succession by favored offspring offemale agnates. See also n. 21 below.

9 Lewis (1980: 149–209) summarizes over seventy Eurasian tales featuring the infant exposureand fostering of heroes or divine rulers—including Sargon of Akkad, Moses, Cyrus, and Romu-lus—collating earlier surveys of this heroic tale type by Gerhard Binder (1964) and Donald Red-ford (1967). Bremmer (1987b: 26–27) discusses its original formulation by the Austrian mythog-rapher J. G. von Hahn.

foster-brothers), Sasruquo sets out to seek his true father. This quest instigates his hero-ic adventures, whereby he retrieves millet seeds and fire stolen by giants. Their defeatis enabled by the treachery of a giantess, who adopts Sasruquo as her milk-son after hissuckling at her breast. With the help of this giant milk-mother, Sasruquo “the milk-suck-er” recaptures the stolen millet seeds and fire from the giants, later engaging in mortalcombat those of his Nart brothers who had tyrannically oppressed their peasants. ButSasruquo is defeated when his Nart brothers ally themselves with the angry giants. Theyobtain from an old sorceress his one vincible secret: his knees or heel, originally graspedby the tongs of the fostering smith Aynar, which they cut through with a discus. Sas-ruquo is then dismembered and buried alive beneath a tumulus, awarding his miracu-lous powers to wild animals who refused to drink his blood.10

These legends of Sasruquo exemplify the plot motifs of proto-Oedipal fos-tering myths reconstructed by Propp, together with those of related Greek heromyths of Achilles, Prometheus and Perseus discussed by Gernet (cf. Tuite1998). Born of an incestuous union, and fated to slay his own sons by impetu-ous accident, only incest committed by Sasruquo seems missing from Propp’sarchetypal schema (although this may be intimated in Abkhazian accounts ofhis physical incorporation of a devoted sister; see Dumézil 1968:563–67). In-cest occurs in other Caucasian legends linking infant fosterage and exposurewith tributary rule. An Abkhazian tradition of the origin of its princely dynastythus derived it by “breast-profaning” descent from an only daughter of a for-mer emperor of the Caucasus, Awblaa, reminiscent of Danae and Perseus (Apol-lodorus II iv.i, Frazer, ed. 1921 I:155; Binder 1981):

Sinfully ravished by her trusted atalyk milk-father, his fearful kin put the princess in achest cast upon the waters. Subsequently discovered by a handsome youth, who marriesher, the princess was again assaulted by the milk-brother of this husband. She then fledwith her newborn child to the protection of a shepherd, before being reunited with herfather at a feast given by the shepherd’s lord. There she recognizes her old atalyk fos-ter-father, who was executed together with the “breast-profaning” milk-brother of herhusband. Her son Apsha [�Abkhaz] was then installed by Awblaa as the first ruler ofAbkhazia (Inal-Ipa 1956:26–27).

Another Jocasta-tale, “Father and Son from the Same Womb,” related as atrue story by Abkhazians, told of the unwitting marriage of a woman with herown abducted son, resulting in tragic suicide.11 Abkhazian legends also relatethe common suckling of abandoned heroes by wild animals—such as wolves,mountain goats, and deer (like Telephus)—as well as their ritual adoption by

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10 This synopsis collates Abkhazian Nart epics of Sasruquo with other Caucasian legends of thispopular hero related in John Colarusso’s Nart Sagas from the Caucasus (2002). On Sasruquo’ssuckling-adoption by the giantess, narrated in an Abaza legend, see Colarusso (2002: 210). On vari-ants of Sasruquo’s fostering and fire-tempering by a divine blacksmith, evidently reminiscent ofAchilles, see Colarusso (2002: 53, 186, 388) and Tuite (1998: 314).

11 This Abkhazian story ressembles widespread folktales of mother-son incest associated withexposure and fosterage treated in essays collected in Edmunds and Dundes (1983). S.v. Aarne andThompson (1964), Tale Types 931–933. On the “mother’s tragedy” as a prologue to the fosteredmale hero’s biography, see Bremmer (1987b: 27–29).

suckling at the breasts of female giants, affording them supernatural assistancelike the fostering giantess of Sasruquo (Inal-Ipa 1956:43–47).

The Keloghlan Boy: Fostering by Giants

Tales of the suckling adoption of legendary heroes by female giants have an ex-traordinarily wide distribution throughout Eurasia, as was revealed in Em-manuel Cosquin’s essay, “Le lait de la mère et le coffre flottant” (1908). Ex-amining a Malay legend about the introduction of Islam to Java, Cosquinnoticed its ubiquitous Eurasian parallels. These included classic motifs of theinfant exposure of a hero in a box cast upon the waters, followed by his divinesuckling and child fostering.12 But another widely diffused tale about milk kin-ship was discerned by Cosquin (1908:398–400). This was a familiar “Jack andthe Beanstalk” fable of an orphaned or fostered boy entering the castle of a gi-ant and stealing magic regalia or treasure, enabling him to marry a princess andbecome king. But his ambitions are crucially realized by a cunning suckling atthe breast of an ogress, forcing her to adopt him as her son by milk kinship, andthereby to reveal vulnerable secrets of her giant husband’s soul, typically lo-cated in an animal or inanimate object. The tale’s prototype seems best attest-ed in Turkish legends of the “Keloghlan Boy,” a destitute and mange-ridden orbald (kel) orphan. Entering a giant’s castle, this improbable boy-hero encoun-ters an ogress kneading dough in a gigantic wooden trough, her pendulousbreasts thrown hideously back over her shoulders. Seizing a breast from behind,he cunningly suckles at her nipple, declaring himself her adoptive son by milkkinship. This obliges the ogress, as his “milk-mother” (Turkish süt ana), to as-sist the hero in defeating her giant husband or brothers, to steal their treasure,and so succeed in his quest to marry a princess and become king.13

Cosquin discovered that this story of milk-kinship adoption by a giantess wastold throughout Turkic Central Asia and the Caucasus (cf. Roux 1967:52;Dumézil 1931:127–31; Grigolia 1962:159). It was found in Iranian oral tradi-tions about comparable dev ogresses; and it has been documented throughoutthe Hindu Kush (Jettmar 1975:228–29, 436).14 It recurs—with the ogress var-


12 On this coffre flottant motif, see Krappe (1927: 12, n. 43) and Holley (1949). A parallel leg-end to Cosquin’s Indonesian myth, recounting a similar introduction of Islam to Madagascar, istreated by Ottino (1984). Segmentary-tributary regimes of cliental milk kinship were characteris-tic of traditional states in both Indonesia and Madagascar.

13 See The Keloghlan and the Padishah’s Youngest Daughter, in the Uysal-Walker Archive ofTurkish Oral Narrative (Uysal-Walker 2003, vol. 29, Story 918: 87–111, on the internet). On thegeneric motif, s.v. Thompson (1956: T671 “Adoption by Suckling”).

14 As readers of my earlier essay on milk kinship in the Hindu Kush (Parkes 2001) would ex-pect, motifs of exposure and infant fosterage also typified its dynastic legends: e.g., the foundingof the Trakhane ruling house of Gilgit by the princely offspring of a tyrant king, cast in a box ontothe river, whose lowly fosterers from the outlying village of Chilas thence become hereditary milk-kin counselors to rulers of Gilgit (Ghulam Muhammad 1904: 124–25; cf. Lewis 1980: 183). Thiscoffre flottant motif, combined with suckling-adoption by a giantess, also occurred in the mythol-ogy of the non-Muslim Kafirs of the Hindu Kush (Jetmmar 1975: 75–76).

iously grinding flour at a huge quernstone, or herbs in a pestle, or kneadingbread again—among Arabs and Berbers throughout northern Africa (Földessy1996: 72), and among South Slavs in the Balkans.15 A Mongolian variant,equally prevalent among northern Slavs, entailed an indirect means of effect-ing milk kinship: by the hero’s feeding a cannibal-giant with loaves of breadbaked with his mother’s or nurse’s breastmilk (Cosquin 1908:408–13). The ge-ographical distribution of these tales thus corresponds with regions of westernEurasia where milk kinship was formerly instituted by infant fosterage (Parkes2003), whose social asymmetries appear fabulously reflected.

“Fostering by Giants” reappears in Old Norse sagas examined by Hilda El-lis (1941). As she curiously noted, “the relationship of the man to the supernat-ural woman is rather a peculiar one; it is as foster-mother rather than as wife ormistress that he seems to regard her . . . the giantess becomes the protector andguardian of the hero for the rest of his life; he is often told to call upon her intime of need, when she will come to his assistance” (Ellis 1941:71). Her gianthusband, if not dispatched by the hero, becomes his foster-father, male nurse(nutritor), and initiator (pedagogus). Ellis finally noted parallels with medievalCeltic legends, such as the fostering of the Irish child-hero Cú Chulainn by theshape-shifting amazon Scáthach.16 In fact, there are many more pertinent Celticparallels to Cosquin’s archetypal foster-fable (e.g. Christiansen 1959), includ-ing an ancient tale of Cú Chulainn’s killing of the giant-king Cú Rói (Baudis1914). But Ellis properly alluded to more focal themes of delegated sucklingand childcare in early Irish legends of Cú Chulainn, which also problematizeentangled relations of natal kinship and fosterage already encountered in leg-ends of Oedipus and Sasruquo.

Cú Chulainn’s Conundrum: Celtic Kinship Interlace

The Irish hero Cú Chulainn (see Fig. 3) had a similarly disputed paternity andsupernatural birth as the Caucasian Nart hero Sasruquo.17

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15 Koljevic (1980: 197–98, 347–48) references V. S. Karadzic’s collections of Serbian epic po-etry on this topic (also including kumstvo ritual kinship with supernatural creatures). Cf. Filipovic(1982: 139) on milk kinship with vila spirits; also Kabakova (1995) and Parkes (n.d.b) on milk kin-ship allegiance in other South Slav legends.

16 Fosterage and warrior training in the wilderness by fénnid sorceresses recurs in legends of thefamous Fenian hero Finn, including his suckling by a druidess milk-mother who is later transformedinto a monster (Nagy 1984; 1985: 99–123). Cosquin’s classic fable of suckling-adoption by a gi-antess also occurs in a Scottish Gaelic tradition (Carmichael 1954: 282) noted by Maier (1999: 155n. 14).

17 See Guyonvarc’h and Le Roux (1965). This correspondence is noted by Colarusso (2002:335; cf. Tuite 1998). The parallel initiation of Sasruquo and Cú Chulainn by blacksmiths seems un-cannily matched by a similar slaying of their own sons with magical weapons forged by these smiths(cf. Ó hUiggin 1996 with Colarusso 2002: 352–55). On filial slaughter, often associated with Oedi-pal incest and parricide, see de Vries (1957); also Róheim’s (1925) contrived but perhaps inspiredcomparison of Cú Chulainn with Oedipus. For comparison with Achilles (and hence again withSasruquo), see Sergent (1999).

Cú Chulainn, named Sétanta at birth, was supposed to be the offspring of a miraculousunion between the god Lug and his mother Deichtine, variably represented as an alien-ated sister or daughter of King Conchobar of Ulster. On his birth, he is immediately giv-en in fosterage to Cet mac Mágach, an exiled vassal of the Irish over-king, who in turnhands him over to his own foster-parents, Srian and Gabur, for nursing. The infant Sé-tanta thus becomes a milk-brother of their son Lóeg, who is taken from his mother’sbreast to nourish the hero, and who will afterwards serve as his devoted charioteer (Hol-lo 1998:16, after Thurneysen 1912:43-48).

Sétanta is later taken into childcare by the blacksmith Culann, referred to as his aite “fos-ter-father,” from whom he is renamed Cú Chulainn, the hound of Culann, after impetu-ously killing the smith’s watchdog. Prior to this, after leaving his parents and infant fos-terers, he commends himself as a five-year-old vassal to King Conchobar of Ulster,seating himself upon the king’s knee as a sign of his adoptive affiliation (cf. Thurney-sen 1930). Conchobar then appoints his sister Finnchóem as the hero’s new foster-moth-er. Other prominent Ulstermen compete for the honour of further fostering the heroicchild, who is subsequently raised and trained in martial arts by the amazon druidessScáthach together with other noble youths, who thereby become his comaltai “foster-brothers-in-arms” (Synopsis from van Hamel 1933:1–8, 39).

Cú Chulainn’s multiple fosterage (Fig. 3) thus provided him with widespreadadoptive linkages throughout Ulster (Jaski 1999:24–28; Boll 2002:46–54). Ashe later boasted to his beloved Emer: “Well have I been brought up by my dearfoster-father Conchobar. . . . Among chariot chiefs and champions, amongjesters and druids, among poets and learned men, among the nobles and lordsof Ulster have I been reared, so that I have all their manners and gifts” (Crossand Slover 1936:158f.). Joseph Nagy pertinently commented on the narrativeand symbolic functions of these adoptive linkages within the ranked segmen-tary order of Irish kingdoms: “Cú Chulainn is fostered by representatives of allsegments of society, high and low. He is thus recreated in the image of societyand is obligated to defend it in its entirety as payment for his fosterage” (1984:28). But such plural fosterage was not uncommon in medieval Ireland: it wasnormal for a child of high status to be appointed a principal fosterer at birth,who would then subcontract the child’s nursing and training to sub-fosterers,variously skilled in educational arts (Charles-Edwards 1993:79). Fostering wasthereby “used by great dynasts, particularly in the form of multiple fosterage,


Figure 3. Cú Chulainn’s foster kin.

to acquire a political following of lesser nobles” (Ó Córrain 1977:77). For CúChulainn, however, these plural fostering relations also play fundamental moralroles in juxtaposition with other ties of kinship and contract.

An ingenious essay on “The Sister’s Son in Early Irish Literature” by TomásÓ Cathasaigh (1986) shows how these juxtaposed allegiances of Cú Chulainnreplay an ancient morality play of primordial kinship obligations, recasting amythical drama already enacted in an earlier legend of The Second Battle ofMag Tuired (Gray 1982). Its relational predicaments concerned the divided pa-ternal and maternal kinship loyalties of the cross-cousins Lug and Bres, re-spectively fostered offspring of the maritally allied Túatha Dé Danann godsand the Fomoiri demons:

After the divine king Núada is maimed in battle, the Túatha Dé Danann women pleadfor his replacement by Bres, their gormac “dutiful son” or adopted sister’s child. Thisdeviation from agnatic succession proves disastrous: Bres was a hopeless king for theTúatha Dé Danann, treacherously allowing his Fomoiri agnatic kinsmen to impose ex-cessive taxes on his subjects, and ultimately to invade them. His counterpart cross-cousin Lug then rallies the Túatha Dé Danann against the Fomoiri, whom he defeats byslinging a stone at his own mother’s father—the giant-king Balor—so powerful that thegiant’s evil eye is cast back through his head to rout his own Fomoiri army. Lug thenwrests from his defeated cousin Bres the secrets of regular cereal cultivation, allowinghim to succeed as a prosperous divine king (Synopsis from Oosten 1985:116–33 and ÓCathasaigh 1986:146–51).

Here we again witness the fated killing of a tyrant sovereign by his fostereddaughter’s son, as identified by Gernet and Propp in archaic Oedipal legends.Yet this Irish myth is unquestionably a morality tale about the propriety of ag-natic succession, counter-posed with infidelities of misplaced “nepotistic” al-legiance to “alien” uterine kin. Far from being a reflection of adoptive matri-lineal succession, as Gernet and Propp might have supposed, these legendsdramatize moral precepts about basic principles of contract ( folad) intrinsic toIrish clientship and clan lordship (Ó Cathasaigh 1986:131; cf. Patterson 1994:316f.). The ultimate message of the tale is that a gormac, “adoptive sister’sson,” should never be elected to kingship: his bilateral allegiances engender acumulative breakdown of all social contracts in the kingdom, only reversed byLug’s heroic assertions of agnatic loyalty.

Now, Cú Chulainn was supposed to be the divinely conceived son of Lug.18

He therefore performs a similar heroic role in the Táin Bó Cúailnge, where theGreat Cattle Raid of the Connachta replays the treacherous invasion of the Fo-moiri demons on the Túatha Dé Danann gods:

Like Bres, Cú Chulainn is the purported sister’s son of an alien ruler, King Conchobarof Ulster. Yet unlike Bres, Cú Chulainn re-contracts undivided allegiance to Conchobar,his foster-adoption superseding his supposed natal tie as Conchobar’s gormac (his adop-

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18 Cf. Gray (1990). Lug appears to Cú Chulainn on the eve of his final battle and defeat of theConnachta, healing and rousing his wounded son to action with a poetic eulogy (O’Rahilly 1976:184).

tive sister’s son or daughter’s son), reconfirmed through fosterage by Conchobar’s sis-ter Finnchóem in Ulster. Cú Chulainn’s non-agnatic status evidently disqualified himfrom royal succession; but it perfectly qualified him for his heroic role as war champi-on of Ulster. As a client of Conchobar, Cú Chulainn would never have dreamed of re-placing or succeeding his combined maternal uncle (or mother’s father), foster-father,and lord. He therefore resists Queen Medb’s attempts to inveigle him in treachery—un-like his foster-father Fergus and several foster-brothers, seduced by Medb to turn againsttheir clan-lord and king, who thus replicate in an agnatic key the uterine treachery ofBres. The pathos of the battle scenes concerns Cú Chulainn’s confrontation with his for-mer aite fosterer-father Fergus—obliged by duties of adoptive kinship secretly to assisthis dalta fosterling—counterposed with his former comaltai “foster-brothers-in-arms,”who fight and are regrettably slain on the battlefield.19

Foster-brotherhood here scarcely proved thicker than blood kinship—once allsocial ties had been corrupted by betrayals to Conchobar as Ulster’s elected trib-al king. Only Cú Chulainn, the devoted gormac or fostered “sister’s child” ofthe kingdom, manages to reverse disorder, like Lug, by exemplifying his dutiesof contractual allegiance. Ó Cathasaigh concludes: “[T]he relationship betweensister’s son and maternal kin . . . can be greatly beneficial to society, or greatlydestructive of social order; the sister’s son must be integrated into society bymeans of a solemn contract; and the social good will be served only if the ob-ligations imposed by that contract are duly discharged by both sides. The so-cial order of the sister’s son can be summed up in the word goire [filial devo-tion], and this is reflected in gormac, which came to replace the inherited[Indo-European term] nia as the designation of ‘sister’s son’” (1986:160).

Bart Jaski (1999), however, indicated that the hypocoristic gormac, or “du-tiful child,” was not a regular synonym for sister’s son: it was a specific adop-tive term, typically for the offspring of a female agnate taken into endowed fosterage and hence quasi-adoption by an heirless maternal relative.20 Jaskitherefore proposed that these legends more particularly comprised a moralityplay about duties of foster-kinship, highlighted by the hero’s ambivalent out-sider status, whereby “a clear message is conveyed: bonds of foster-kinship arebeneficial if they are honoured, but lead to destruction if they are neglected,


19 See Wong (1993) and Boll (2002: 158–63) on the complex emotional ties of foster-kinshipand family vengeance in these tragic conflicts manipulated by Medb; also O’Rahilly (1976: 94–95, verses 3106–42, trans., pp. 206–7) for Cú Chulainn’s poetic lament on killing his comalta fos-ter-brother Fer Diad, “loved comrade, my kith and kin.” Entangled ties of foster-kinship also sur-round the death and avenging of Cú Chulainn: in a version of the Aided Chon Culainn, vengeanceis taken by his primary foster-brother Conall Cernach, son of Conchobar’s sister Finnchóem, on theConnachta champion, Cet mac Mágach—that is, the foster-father who had originally arranged thehero’s suckling with his own wet-nurse Gabur according to a Compert Chon Culainn tradition (seeFig. 2; Thurneysen 1912: 43–48; cf. Guyonvarc’h and Le Roux 1965–1966)—who is also some-times represented as Conall Cernach’s maternal uncle.

20 See Ó Cathasaigh (1986: 136–40) on gormac, whose reflex is Modern Irish garmhac “grand-son”; and cf. Welsh mab gwaer (Binchy 1956). On the adoptive affiliation of cadet offspring of fe-male agnates, which such patronal fostering facilitated, see Charles-Edwards (1993: 312f.) and Pat-terson (1994: 243f.). Cú Chulainn’s variable identity as either “sister’s son” or “daughter’s son” toConchobar might suggest this classificatory natal status as the child of an alienated female agnate(cf. Huld 1961).

even if honour is at stake” (1999:27). Jaski’s focus on foster-kinship in theselegends thus complements Ó Cathasaigh’s discernment of their moral juxtapo-sitions of agnatic and matrilateral kinship, with which fosterage was entwined.Indeed, they dramatically apprehend problematic configurations of EugeneHammel’s (1968) “alternative social structures” of variously combined and opposed ties of descent, alliance and adoptive allegiance (Parkes 2003:760),which were not always easily reconciled.

the moral ambivalence of foster-kinship

As Jaski indicated, the poignancy of foster-ties persisting through political en-mities was portrayed by the primary narrator of the Táin Bó Cúailnge: Cú Chu-lainn’s aite foster-father Fergus, beguiled by queen Medb to join her Connach-ta forces against Ulster, yet who secretly assists his fosterling and demands fairplay in his combat. But other foster-kin of the hero, similarly seduced byMedb’s promises of conquered land, or espousal of her daughter, agree to fighthim: “Cú Chulainn regrets that they seek him out for combat, and appeals totheir bond as foster-brothers and to their mutual affection. However, none ofthem retreats, and all share the same fate. Their deaths highlight the destruc-tiveness of warfare, which rips through bonds of brotherhood and comradeship”(Jaski 1999:26–27).

Yet these were Cú Chulainn’s “foster-brothers-in-arms”: adoptive conscriptsand sworn companions raised together in warrior training under Scáthach (cf.Wong 1993). Their disloyalty is therefore understandably contrasted with thefirmer loyalty of aite foster-fathers like Fergus, contractually obliged to protecthis dalta fosterling; or of Cú Chulainn’s devoted milk-brother Lóeg, his everfaithful charioteer, taken away from the breast of his own mother so that the in-fant hero could be nursed in his place (Hollo 1998:16; cf. Nagy 1999:216, 219,223–26 on their symbolic “twinning”); or, indeed, of his co-raised foster-broth-er Conall Cernach, who ultimately avenges the hero’s death. Although infantsuckling, nursing, and child fosterage were lexically conflated by this time, me-dieval Irish legends seem to have retained a moral partitioning of differentialdegrees of adoptive kinship through altram fosterage, where nurturant dutiesof adoptive parenthood and cliental allegiances of milk kinship remained fun-damental.21 But remoter ties of foster-kinship might tragically buckle under the

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21 On cliental and patronal alignments of allegiance-fosterage, see Parkes (2003: 743–44, 766–67). Patronal child fosterage in early medieval Europe seems commonly associated with senior ma-ternal kin (Bremmer 1976; 1983; cf. R. H. Bremmer 1980; Smith 1992: 7–9; Nolte 1995). Antici-pating feudal commendation, it supplanted cliental infant fostering in developing patrimonialstates, albeit perpetuating its traditional terms of milk kinship for child fostering (Parkes 2003: 766).A late Elizabethan tract on Ireland, however, indicates cliental fostering by noble “miltch nurses”persisting at the end of the sixteenth century, together with several kinds of “dry fosterage”: theirpolitical ties of fealty, in combination with gossipred (spiritual kinship including covenants of con-fraternity), are highlighted in this recently edited document (Fitzsimons 2001, citing London PROState Papers 63/203/119, pp. 121–25). In addition to published references on Irish fosterage cited

strain of alternative loyalties; their legendary idealization may even have pro-moted their dissatisfaction, and hence their disparagement.

In a concise three-page article, Colin Ireland alerted precise attention to thishitherto neglected “Ambiguous Attitude toward Fosterage in Early Irish Litera-ture” (1997). One maxim bluntly declared that “Fosterage should be impugned!”Another counseled, “Better a small kindred than a great deal of fosterage.” AsIreland comments, “By stressing the fine ‘kin, family group’ over the concept ofaltramm [fosterage] it appears to favour blood relationships to contractual ones.”An Old Irish triad cynically condemned all such precarious contracts: “Threedark things of the world: giving a thing into keeping, guaranteeing, fostering.”Atreatise on princely education observed that “Every indecorous person is a fos-terer,” and “Everyone is tranquil until it comes to fosterage.” Colin Ireland fi-nally remarks that “this last statement suggests that keeping all parties involvedin a fosterage contract satisfied was not an easy task” (1997:95).

Ambivalence is reflected in other Irish legends of fosterage (cf. Boll 2002:ch. 4). In Esnada Tige Buchet, the once prosperous hospitaller Buchet is re-duced to abject penury by the profligate visits of his royal fosterling’s brothers:prodigal princes whose perpetual hosting drives Buchet into destitute exile. Yethe is redeemed when his foster-daughter marries the king of Tara, rewardingher foster-father with her maritally endowed property (Charles-Edwards 1993:81–82). Social parasitism by fostered lords and their noble kin—recallingthose “ingrate cuckoos” of Gerald of Wales—is further evinced in a Welsh say-ing that it was among the “curses of a cenedl kindred” to have the son of a chief-tain imposed upon it by coerced fosterage (Ellis 1982 I:385). Llinos BeverlySmith (1992:21f.) also noted medieval Welsh legends treating “the theme ofjealousy and rivalry between natural brothers and the unholy alliance of foster-brothers,” inciting fratricidal feuding, as in the opening passage of BreuddwydRhonaby. While often sentimentally idealized, bonds of foster-kinship couldthus be vilified as topics of villainous treachery, or seigniorial manipulation(Smith 1992:24–25; cf. Anderson 2004).

Norse and Icelandic sagas betray similar uneasiness about foster-kinship.Just as Irish law prescribed “avenging the foster-son of the kin” as one of “fourblameless killings” (Kelly 1988:89), Icelandic law prescribed rights ofvengeance for foster-kin equivalent to cognate kin (Laws of Early Iceland 1980:154f.). But in saga literature underlying inequalities of status and power are of-ten highlighted. In the Laxdaela saga, the central character Dórdr was thusobliged to seek sanctuary from a powerful chieftain, Höskuldr, by abjectly tak-ing his bastard son Oláfr into fosterage:

The fosterling Oláfr, sired illegitimately from a slave concubine, turns out to be the sonof a captured Irish princess, whose innate nobility wins his father’s heart over his legit-


in Parkes (2003:754f.), see Ó hInnse (1943) and dissertations by Bronagh Ní Chonaill (1996) andSheila Boll (2002).

imate sons and heirs. On Höskuldr’s death, being debarred from inheritance, Oláfr is be-queathed a treasured ring and sword that his father had been given by king Hákon ofNorway. At Höskuldr’s funeral feast, the jealousy of his half-brother Dorleikr requiredOláfr to repeat the act of deference that had initiated his own fosterage: he offers to raiseDorleikr’s son Bolli as his fosterling, since, as the Old Norse saying went, “he is calledthe lesser man who fosters another’s child.” But despite their childhood companionship,Bolli subsequently fell out with Oláfr’s son Kjartan, when both woo fair and fickle Gu-drún. Goaded by her to prove his devotion by attacking Kjartan, Bolli dealt his foster-brother a fatal sword-blow. Old Oláfr, who had foreseen this family tragedy, refused totake blood vengeance on his fosterling; but his widow, who had lovingly nursed andraised Bolli, ultimately incited another son to slay him.22

This convoluted family saga again juxtaposes Hammel’s (1968) “alternativesocial structures” of kinship, alliance, and adoptive allegiance that we wit-nessed in Irish legends. The nurturant bond of foster-fatherhood persists in spiteof enmities with natal kin; but ties of foster-brotherhood fail.23 In addition, theIcelandic saga-teller’s sympathies lie with the socially subordinate parties: theonly paragons to emerge from this tragedy are lowly Dórdr, his bastard foster-ling Oláfr, and the latter’s son Kjartan. It is therefore the weak clients or disin-herited offspring who prove morally superior to their noble foster-kin. A pecu-liar fascination of these Irish and Icelandic family chronicles thus lies in theirstructural and emotional interlacing of alternative status alignments and obli-gations of natal kinship and fosterage.

Ambivalence surrounding allegiances of fosterage was equally evident inInal-Ipa’s recorded recollections of the Abkhazian atalyk institution, as alsoportrayed in the Nart legends of the Caucasus. Heroic ideals of loyalty amongmilk kin were again highlighted by contrasted acts of horrifying treachery,“breast-profaning” rape, and other tyrannical abuses of status and power. Evenpopular fables of milk kinship with ogresses and cannibal giants evince this du-plicity: subaltern child-heroes such as the Keloghlan Boy trick a supernaturalbeing into treachery of her kind by a cunning performative act of symbolicadoption, furtively sucking her nipple from behind her back, or feeding a giantloaves secretly adulterated with breastmilk. This effectively fools these clum-sy powers into complicity with the poor boy’s quest, as with the hero Sasruquoand his giantess. But such tricked adoption seemed scarcely a responsible so-cial contract; it was rather portrayed as a cunningly twisted inversion of cuck-old kinship, a warped weapon of the weak.

James Scott’s (1990) Gramscian perspectives on folklore would indicate thatthese popular tales of peasant cunning might encrypt “hidden transcripts” of a

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22 Synopsis after Magnusson and Pálsson (1975). On Norse and Icelandic legendary treatmentsof foster-kinship, see Du Chaillu (1889 II: chs. 4–5), and Robert Brown’s (1998) dissertation onthe internet; also Parks and Caldwell (2002).

23 The Faithless Foster-Brother is an indexed “type motif” characteristic of medieval Irish andIcelandic legends: see under Thompson Motif P273.2 in Boberg (1956) and Cross (1952) for itstypical themes of treachery and quasi-incestuous adultery.

latently resistant political consciousness, ironically exposing the status in-equalities disguised by foster kinship. Yet Inal-Ipa’s Abkhazian ethnographyshowed its heroic idealization at least equivalent to its cynical deprecation incollective memory. Such ambivalent evaluation, contrasting real and ideal al-legiances of foster-kinship, was equally evident in Irish and Icelandic legends,also counterposing contractual ties of fosterage with natal ties of consanguini-ty. Fosterage and milk kinship were again acknowledged to be somewhat ficti-tious devices of familial allegiance to superior powers, variously represented infables and legends as supernatural monsters or as temporal lords. Yet these ad-mittedly manipulated kinship ties were validated in legend as legitimate meansof empowerment: the fostering vassal exploited internecine animosities amongruling status groups, just as the fostered Keloghlan Boy exploited feuding ri-valries in the fabulous world of giants and cannibal ogres. The Oedipal foster-ling, distributed as a child through all orders of society, thereby embraced theseorders as his familial domain, albeit also often embracing their societal antino-mies by his unnatural acts of familial incest and kin-slaying. As Scott (1976)originally argued, a traditional “moral economy” (or natural law) perforce re-spected reasonable reciprocities of contractual allegiance between innate statusunequals: of patronal protection and of cliental support, as well as of commu-nal solidarity in the face of tyranny, which ranked tributary polities even hege-monically demanded (cf. Reynolds 1984). The moral ambivalence of fosteragein this political context, troublesomely combining kinship loyalties with vas-salic or villeinal duties, was therefore emblematic of an ambivalent politicalmorality arguably inherent in segmentary-tributary polities (Parkes 2003: 768–71), which were integrated by means of such adoptive kinship.

conclusion

“I give you milk to become the brother of my sons . . . Among us Berbers milk kinshipis equivalent to heredity” (from The Bayan Legend, cited in Gautier 1927:251).

“Cette fille est ma soeur de lait, et ce lien qui nous en parait pas un, n’est pas sans forcepour les gens de cet état . . .” (Chodelas de Laclos, Les Liasions Dangereuses, lettreLXXXI from La Marquise de Mertueil to Vicomte de Valmont).

This outline survey of narrative representations of allegiance fosterage appearsto corroborate our earlier conjectures of its former prevalence and social sig-nificance in premodern Europe and Asia.24 Drawing on Gernet’s classic study


24 Yet I have scarcely discussed here the narrative symbolism of milk kinship in Islamic Asia,which I intend to treat separately (cf. Parkes n.d.a). Similar moral ambivalence surrounding asym-metric allegiances of milk kinship may be equally illustrated in Iranian, Arab, and Berber legends.But an additional Muslim emphasis is upon milk kinship as a tragically discovered jural barrier tointended marriage, which remains a stock motif in Arab romantic literature and soap opera. For acombination of this theme with that of the Keloghlan Boy, exemplifying other motifs of Turkishsüt milk kinship, see Kamber and Arzu in the Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative(Uysal and Walker 2003, vol. 23, Story 723: 54–77).

of infant fosterage in ancient Greek legend, and Propp’s explorations of its ar-chetypal Oedipal motifs of heroic exposure and fostering, I have indicated thatsimilar moral predicaments surrounding tributary allegiances of adoptive kin-ship recur in legends throughout western Eurasia. Apart from their psycholog-ical play with alternative emotional loyalties of natal kinship and contractualduties of kingship and clientship—which Propp and subsequent scholars havewell explored in comparative folklore, historical narrative, and classical drama(cf. Fox 1988; Huys 1995; Boll 2002)—these fostering legends point to an en-demic ambivalence surrounding the political deployment of fosterage for se-curing succession and feudatory rule in traditional states.

As Thomas Trautmann (1981:425) has indicated, dispersed or “extensive”rules of marital alliance in western Eurasia precluded possibilities of regularlyconsolidating familial allegiances of tributary rule, characteristic of segmentarystates able to deploy “intensive” strategies of marital alliance (such as Dravid-ian kingdoms of South India). Rules of dispersed marital alliance, on the otherhand, “give no opportunity to place marriage at the center of the web of po-litical alliances” (1981:426; cf. J. Goody 1983:31–33). Adoptive kinshipthrough fosterage, however, did provide an alternative opportunity for creatingand perpetuating “intensive” webs of tributary allegiance. It was capable of reg-ularly replicating linkages between ruling descent lines, as Gernet discerned inarchaic Greece, and of extending these linkages as feudatory chains of unilat-eral alliance, as exemplified in the Hindu Kush and the Caucasus.25 Marriagemight also be used on occasion to create such dynastic ties of fealty; but mar-riage could rarely be deployed so “intensively” to replicate allegiances in west-ern Eurasia. Nor, with the exception of concubinage (or the rare Cinderella),did marital alliance normally straddle separate status groups, rather than gra-dations of tributary rank, as fosterage often did.26 It was this “unnatural” con-nection between otherwise disparate status groups—unprecedented by normalconjugality—that seems to have tainted foster-kinship with its ambivalentevaluation. This was often clientelism dressed in a false plumage of kinship:cuckold consanguinity.

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25 Ó hInnse (1943: 159) indicates a similar perpetuation of cliental allegiances of fosterage inlate medieval Ireland, where “the fostering of a chief’s son was usually given to one of his sub-familes [sc. retainers or vassals], and the names of these families constantly recur in the State Pa-pers . . . e.g., the O Donnellys as fosterers to the O Neills, and the O Gallaghers to the O Donnells.”Reiterated clan and family allegiances of fosterage, combined with contracts of “manrent” fealty,are also archivally documented for early modern Highland Scotland (Skene 1890: 321–23; Curle1896; cf. Wormald 1985:205 no. 2, 206 no. 5, 255 no. 13, 392 no. 73).

26 Allegiance between non-marriageable status categories also accounts for dynastic deploy-ments of milk kinship in Arab caliphates (Parkes 2003: 747; cf. also Crone 1998: 7), together withtypically “intensive” intra-dynastic marital alliance. Spiritual kinship subsequently substituted forsuch allegiances of cliental fosterage in medieval Christendom. But its normal patronal alignmentof sponsorship, or simple intensification of natal kinship, rendered godparenthood a less morallyproblematic construction of adoptive kinship (Parkes 2003: 769–70; cf. Fine 1994), as was court-ly “apprentice fosterage” among knightly elites in medieval Europe (Guerreau-Jalabert 1999: 275–77; Le Jan 1993; cf. Parkes 2003: 766).

Ambivalence surrounding former political deployments of fosterage mightalso explain its neglect in historical and ethnographic scholarship.27 Within Is-lamic Asia—as I can attest from my own fieldwork enquiries on this topic inthe Hindu Kush—former allegiances of fosterage and milk kinship tend to bedenied or dismissed nowadays as perverse relics of a properly forgotten feudalera (cf. Staley 1982:112). In nearby Baltistan, Richard Emerson similarly ac-knowledged that his account of dynastic ties of milk kinship “comes from in-formants who in every instance preferred to change the subject,” responding tohis enquiries on this topic “with contempt and a little fear” (1984:118–19).Modern Abkhazians and other Caucasians may be equally dismissive of re-membered evidence of atalyk fosterage, so scrupulously documented by Shal-va Inal-Ipa barely fifty years ago (cf. Grigolia 1962). Not a few modern histo-rians of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales appear to be just as amnesic about thepersistence of child-fosterage in local clientage, surviving well into the seven-teenth century in the western British Isles (O’Curry 1873 II:355; Skene 1890:190–92, 321–23; Curle 1896; cf. Fitzsimons 2001:138f.).

The “unnaturalness” of these tributary foster-relations—delegating childrento alien households for purposes of political allegiance—has therefore alwaysbeen recognized. Foster-kinship might be dogmatically identified with consan-guinity; for it thereby served as a means of substantively allying disparate sta-tus groups through clientelism disguised as kinship, with obvious benefits ofsecured protection and support for all parties in conditions of insecurity andepisodic violence characteristic of segmentary-tributary polities. From a subal-tern perspective, represented in popular fables, it was an allegiance that couldbe manipulated by cunning, as Sasruquo and other child heroes co-opted thepowerful world of cannibal giants to their advantage by means of milk-kinshipadoption. For dynastic rulers and local lords, it was a valuable mechanism oftributary control, mustering loyal support in their internecine struggles for su-premacy, as Inal-Ipa amply documented in Abkhazia.28 For all parties, it couldbe an attractively romantic ideal of reciprocated allegiance and honorable com-radeship, transcending status and rank, as nobly demonstrated by Cú Chulainn’s


27 This former political significance of tributary fosterage was recognized by such foundationalanthropologists and juristic historians as Sir Henry Maine, Josef Kohler, Max Pappenheim, and S.R. Steinmetz (referenced in Parkes 2003; cf. Gwynn 1913; Bühler 1962). While communal kinshipfosterage and adoption among social equals is receiving increasing anthropological attention (e.g.Carsten 2000, and ethnographic cases referenced in the final paragraph below), more problematicasymmetric alignments of allegiance fosterage in socially ranked communities remain significantlyneglected (see n. 29 below).

28 Cf. Ó Corráin (1977: 77): “Fosterage [in Ireland] was a solemn contractual relationship andformed a primary bond between families and individuals so related—a bond, for obvious rea-sons in a segmentary system, on occasion more reliable than the bonds of actual kinship since sup-porters acquired in this way could never become one’s rivals for office within one’s own lineage.”Cf. Parkes (2001: 9, 21–27) on such segmentary dynastic rivalries orchestrating milk-kinship al-legiances in the Hindu Kush, which might be read as an appropriate ethnographic coda to this es-say.

goire devotion and warrior services to King Conchobar of Ulster. But in prac-tice, this adoptive kinship ideal could never be too satisfactorily realized as arelationship wholly comparable or compatible with natal kinship.

Nor was it ever wholeheartedly believed in popular opinion or proverbialwisdom. For unlike communal fostering among fellow kin—which may allowa full conflation of adoptive kinship with natal kinship (e.g. Marshall 1977;Guemple 1979; Carsten 1991; Weismantel 1995; Alber 2003)—allegiance fos-terage, by its unnatural insinuation of kinship with differential status and pow-er, has always been hedged with moral uncertainties. As Arabs paradoxicallyput it, “blood is thicker than milk;” yet foster-kinship might match natal kin-ship as a strategic relationship “equivalent to heredity.” Maybe more so: as anever adaptable kinship, whose inter-status allegiances through wet-nursing orchild-raising persist in parts of Europe and Latin America, as in Islamic Asia.29

Seen through the symbolic lens of traditional narrative, maternal breastfeedingand pro-parental nurture do seem to have been ingeniously and even perhapsperversely deployed to serve as vital linkages of adoptive kinship in the socialand imaginative construction of tributary polities throughout western Eu-rasia—however troubling these adoptive linkages proved in social practice, asin their legendary reflection.

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Fosterage, Kinship, and Legend: When Milk Was Thicker than