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: the cuckoo's alien nesting of its eggs. From antiquity, the cuckoo became emblematic of a perverted kind of parentage, elaborated in allegorical bestiaries (Mannhardt 1858) and riddling verse about abuses of fosterage as “cuckold kinship” (Crawford 1999:124–25). Notoriously, the “ingrate cuckoo” was supposed ultimately to devour its attendant nurse and adoptive siblings (Hardy 1879:64–65; see, e.g., Shakespeare's King Lear I, iv, l. 235). Colonial disparagements of allegiance fosterage recurrently evoked this ancient avian imagery of perverted parentage. Gerald of Wales, whose twelfth-century diatribes against the evils of Irish and Welsh fostering are well known (Parkes 2003: 755), thus decried “the cuckoo who would devour his foster-parents when fully grown” (Speculum duorum, ed. Richter 1974:6), doubtless alluding to Welsh customary inheritance of peasant farmholdings by noble fosterlings (Smith 1992:21). Eight centuries later, Colonel Reginald Schomberg wryly observed how, in the Hindu Kush, “foster-parents continually show great devotion and abnegation to this cuckoo [sc. princely fosterling] in their nest, and their own children suffer” (1938:226; cf. Parkes 2001:12, 26).

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

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

Sir John Davies was one of the main architects of the English juridical dismantling of Irish traditional states in the seventeenth century (Pawlisch 1988). His denigration of their “barbarous” and “unnatural” customs was therefore designed to justify his own radical plans for Ireland's imperial reformation, just as Gerald of Wales had earlier staked moral claims to colonization with an identical disparagement of Celtic fosterage (cf. Gillingham 1992). But despite their ideological motivation, these colonial opinions were not ungrounded in observation (Fitzsimons 2001). Tributary factions of adoptive kin did seem to have an affinity with instabilities of dynastic succession in segmentary states, albeit consolidating power once succession was secured (Parkes 2003:760). Nor was such fosterage invariably condemned in colonial imagination. Some English observers, such as Edmund Campion in the sixteenth century, rather admired how the Irish “love tenderly their fosterchildren, and bequeathe to them a childes portion whereby they nourish sure friendshippe, so beneficial in every way, that commonly five hundredth kyne and better are given in reward to winne a nobleman's childe to foster” (“A History of Ireland” [1571] in Ware 1809:19).

Colonial denigration of fosterage may also be matched by its troubled indigenous evaluation. Surveying its legendary representations in this essay, we shall observe a recurrent moral ambivalence surrounding its challenges to contrary claims of consanguinity. Allegiances of foster-kinship might be romantically valorized as emblems of secure trust in segmentary states of episodically violent animosities, “whereby they nourish sure friendshippe.” Yet these delegated parental ties, like similar bonds of spiritual kinship, were recognized to be compacts of a somewhat fictitious filiation between disparate ranks. They might even encourage exploitative social parasitism and treachery towards one's natal kind, when “preferring their foster-children and milk-siblings (alumnos et collactaneos), they would persecute their own brothers and cognate kin (fratres et cognatos)” (Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica Dist. III, c. 23; ed. Dimock 1867:167–68). Fealty and treachery, natural sociality and unnatural allegiance, incest and kin-slaying—these emerge as recurrent motifs in the narrative symbolism of tributary fosterage:

Milk and Blood: Atalyk Fosterage in Abkhazia

Infant fosterage in premodern Eurasia was commonly identified with consanguineal kinship created by suckling breastmilk, as is still recognized in Islamic law.³

Abkhazians considered kinship created by delegated suckling fully equivalent to consanguinity. As Aristotle and Galen had supposed, breastmilk was thought to be a purified refinement of a woman's uterine blood.⁴

This ideal collaboration among milk kin was, however, subject to ambivalent reflection. Abkhazian oral histories recounted tragic treacheries among milk-brothers, as well as gross abuses of trust, including incestuous “profanation of the breast” committed by fostered lords on their kinswomen by milk. Inal-Ipa comments: “With this so-called ‘mutual assistance’ [of milk kin] in bloodfeuds, as in all similar affairs, the side of the good old atalyk fosterer, being peasantry, suffered incomparably more, as one might expect” (1956:102). Blood debts of vengeance among nobility could be exacted on their peasant foster-kin as proxy victims. Yet disparities of rank entailed disparities of vengeance and compensation among milk kin, belying a supposed reciprocity of mutual obligation created by sacred breastmilk: “If a prince killed a peasant, then the kin of the latter had no rights of blood vengeance; for as they said, ‘The blood of a peasant is not worth the blood of a prince.’ And so, in place of a murderous prince, his atalyk fosterer had to answer for the blood he had spilled” (ibid.). Just as Schomberg had reported grumbling resentments of vassal fosterers in the Hindu Kush—where “foster-brothers have spent all their substance on some useless 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 Abkhazian term akhupka for a fostered ward was proverbial for an overindulged ingrate. An obnoxious visitor would be told: “You allow yourself a lot of liberties, just as if you were our akhupka [fosterling]” (Benet 1974:58).

Abkhazian milk kinship could be extended by symbolic suckling at the breast, incorporating adults as well as infants, with identical moral obligations and impediments on marriage to those created through infant fosterage. Ritual adoption by token suckling or “breast-biting” (akءukatshara) was employed to defuse suspicions of adultery or to create conciliatory milk kinship after bloodfeud. It was also used to create reciprocal bond-partnerships, with a mutual “biting of the breast” of one or both of the adoptive brothers' mothers, and occasionally of their own male nipples, as also occurred in the Hindu Kush (Inal-Ipa 1956:72f.; cf. Parkes 2000:276). But such symbolic adoption was primarily deployed as a performative rite of fealty between peasant and lord, the latter assuming the role of akhupka fosterling, and so receiving “his share” of tribute and labor services in a kinship idiom of foster-prestations. Collective vassalage by “breast-biting” adoption would be undertaken by whole village communities with regional bailiffs, allied by real or symbolic milk kinship to feudatory overlords, who were allied in turn as fosterers and milk kin to ruling princes (Inal-Ipa 1956:74–75). Caucasian atalyk fosterage thus comprised a pervasive feudatory network of tributary allegiances, similar to milk-kinship chains of dynastic fealty in the Hindu Kush (Parkes 2001). In both regions, milk-kinship ties were perpetuated by reiterated contracts of fosterage in each generation, treated as social “heirlooms” of hereditary vassalage or tenant service (Inal-Ipa 1956:18).

Inal-Ipa's ethnography of Abkhazian milk kinship also elucidates the narrative symbolism of infant fosterage elsewhere in western Eurasia. In an Old Irish tale of Fergus Mac Léti, for example, this legendary king of Ulster was said to be 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 sayings treated by O'Brien (1938), which explain why cích “breast, nipple” became synonymous for “peace-treaty” and “friendship,” and why “breast-sucking” (sugere mammellas) refers to sworn loyalty in the Confession of St Patrick. Gricourt (1957) noticed other allusions to such symbolic suckling recurring in Irish hagiographies, suggesting that Celtic fosterage, like Norse fóstr-kinship, may have been once instituted as a form of tributary milk kinship comparable with atalyk fosterage in the Caucasus.⁶

Fosterage and Legend

Over seventy years ago, the French classicist Louis Gernet published an erudite essay, “Fosterage et légende” (1932), examining numerous instances of such infant fosterage in the Homeric epics. A recurrent motif was that of the hero, such as Theseus, sent away at birth to be nursed and raised by maternal kin. Infant nursing of princes might be undertaken for their protection, as was Nestor, fostered at Gerenia before his return to rule at Pylos. Sometimes a legacy of heirlooms was deposited for the child to retrieve on maturity, such as the sword and boots deposited under a rock for Theseus. In legends of Attic kings, fostering by maternal kin might be concluded by epiklerate in-marriage, securing succession from an avuncular fosterer and father-in-law (cf. Bremmer 1983). Other Greek myths and legends simply related the “carrying” of heroes at birth to their appointed nurses, whose husbands would serve as the child's pedagogue: the mythical prototype of such foster-tutelage was the centaur Cheiron, who successively raised such heroes as Achilles as warrior, Actaeon as hunter, and Asclepios as healer (Fig. 1). Gernet concluded that infant fosterage must have been institutionalized in archaic Greece.

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

Epigraphic analyses of funerary epitaphs—particularly among Greeks of Asia Minor (Cameron 1939)—corroborate such delegation of infants to subordinate fosterers, creating ties of adoptive kinship (threptós, syntrophoi) apparently similar to those of Caucasian atalyk fosterage (cf. Nani 1944; Levick et al. 1988:xliv–lvi). Etruscan depictions of the mythical adoption by suckling of an adult Hercules by the goddess Hera or Juno (Fig. 2) suggest milk kinship symbolically underpinning such fosterage, as was adduced by Josef Kohler (1905; cf. Deonna 1954:250–55; Renard 1964). Diodorus of Sicily, alluding to this myth in the first century B.C., already supposed it to be an archaic Greek rite of adoptive parentage, noting that it was “a ceremony still in use among barbarians when they want to adopt a child” (Diodorus IV ch. 39.2).⁷

The ritual suckling of Hercules (Hercle) by Hera or Juno (Uni), establishing the mortal hero's apotheosis within the Olympian pantheon by milk kinship. Etruscan bronze mirror engraving from Volterra in the Museo Archeologico, Florence (72740; see Monaco 1933). Illustration from Deonna (1954:153, Planche VI, Fig. 9).

Cú Chulainn's Conundrum: Celtic Kinship Interlace

The Irish hero Cú Chulainn (see Fig. 3) had a similarly disputed paternity and supernatural birth as the Caucasian Nart hero Sasruquo.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 uncannily 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 Oedipal incest and parricide, see de Vries (1957); also Róheim's (1925) contrived but perhaps inspired comparison of Cú Chulainn with Oedipus. For comparison with Achilles (and hence again with Sasruquo), see Sergent (1999).

Cú Chulainn, named Sétanta at birth, was supposed to be the offspring of a miraculous union between the god Lug and his mother Deichtine, variably represented as an alienated sister or daughter of King Conchobar of Ulster. On his birth, he is immediately given in fosterage to Cet mac Mágach, an exiled vassal of the Irish over-king, who in turn hands him over to his own foster-parents, Srian and Gabur, for nursing. The infant Sétanta thus becomes a milk-brother of their son Lóeg, who is taken from his mother's breast to nourish the hero, and who will afterwards serve as his devoted charioteer (Hollo 1998:16, after Thurneysen 1912:43-48).

Sétanta is later taken into childcare by the blacksmith Culann, referred to as his aite “foster-father,” from whom he is renamed Cú Chulainn, the hound of Culann, after impetuously killing the smith's watchdog. Prior to this, after leaving his parents and infant fosterers, 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. Thurneysen 1930). Conchobar then appoints his sister Finnchóem as the hero's new foster-mother. Other prominent Ulstermen compete for the honour of further fostering the heroic child, who is subsequently raised and trained in martial arts by the amazon druidess Scáthach 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 widespread adoptive linkages throughout Ulster (Jaski 1999:24–28; Boll 2002:46–54). As he later boasted to his beloved Emer: “Well have I been brought up by my dear foster-father Conchobar. . . . Among chariot chiefs and champions, among jesters and druids, among poets and learned men, among the nobles and lords of Ulster have I been reared, so that I have all their manners and gifts” (Cross and Slover 1936:158f.). Joseph Nagy pertinently commented on the narrative and symbolic functions of these adoptive linkages within the ranked segmentary order of Irish kingdoms: “Cú Chulainn is fostered by representatives of all segments of society, high and low. He is thus recreated in the image of society and 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 was normal 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 was thereby “used by great dynasts, particularly in the form of multiple fosterage, to acquire a political following of lesser nobles” (Ó Córrain 1977:77). For Cú Chulainn, however, these plural fostering relations also play fundamental moral roles in juxtaposition with other ties of kinship and contract.

Cú Chulainn's foster kin.

An ingenious essay on “The Sister's Son in Early Irish Literature” by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh (1986) shows how these juxtaposed allegiances of Cú Chulainn replay an ancient morality play of primordial kinship obligations, recasting a mythical drama already enacted in an earlier legend of The Second Battle of Mag Tuired (Gray 1982). Its relational predicaments concerned the divided paternal and maternal kinship loyalties of the cross-cousins Lug and Bres, respectively fostered offspring of the maritally allied Túatha Dé Danann gods and the Fomoiri demons:

After the divine king Núada is maimed in battle, the Túatha Dé Danann women plead for his replacement by Bres, their gormac “dutiful son” or adopted sister's child. This deviation from agnatic succession proves disastrous: Bres was a hopeless king for the Túatha Dé Danann, treacherously allowing his Fomoiri agnatic kinsmen to impose excessive 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 by slinging a stone at his own mother's father—the giant-king Balor—so powerful that the giant's evil eye is cast back through his head to rout his own Fomoiri army. Lug then wrests from his defeated cousin Bres the secrets of regular cereal cultivation, allowing him to succeed as a prosperous divine king (Synopsis from Oosten 1985:116–33 and Ó Cathasaigh 1986:146–51).

Here we again witness the fated killing of a tyrant sovereign by his fostered daughter'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 agnatic succession, counter-posed with infidelities of misplaced “nepotistic” allegiance to “alien” uterine kin. Far from being a reflection of adoptive matrilineal succession, as Gernet and Propp might have supposed, these legends dramatize moral precepts about basic principles of contract (folad) intrinsic to Irish clientship and clan lordship (Ó Cathasaigh 1986:131; cf. Patterson 1994: 316f.). The ultimate message of the tale is that a gormac, “adoptive sister's son,” should never be elected to kingship: his bilateral allegiances engender a cumulative breakdown of all social contracts in the kingdom, only reversed by Lug's heroic assertions of agnatic loyalty.

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

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

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

Like Bres, Cú Chulainn is the purported sister's son of an alien ruler, King Conchobar of 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 adoptive sister's son or daughter's son), reconfirmed through fosterage by Conchobar's sister Finnchóem in Ulster. Cú Chulainn's non-agnatic status evidently disqualified him from royal succession; but it perfectly qualified him for his heroic role as war champion of Ulster. As a client of Conchobar, Cú Chulainn would never have dreamed of replacing 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—unlike his foster-father Fergus and several foster-brothers, seduced by Medb to turn against their clan-lord and king, who thus replicate in an agnatic key the uterine treachery of Bres. The pathos of the battle scenes concerns Cú Chulainn's confrontation with his former aite fosterer-father Fergus—obliged by duties of adoptive kinship secretly to assist his dalta fosterling—counterposed with his former comaltai “foster-brothers-in-arms,” who fight and are regrettably slain on the battlefield.¹⁹

See Wong (1993) and Boll (2002: 158–63) on the complex emotional ties of foster-kinship and 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 foster-brother Fer Diad, “loved comrade, my kith and kin.” Entangled ties of foster-kinship also surround the death and avenging of Cú Chulainn: in a version of the Aided Chon Culainn, vengeance is taken by his primary foster-brother Conall Cernach, son of Conchobar's sister Finnchóem, on the Connachta champion, Cet mac Mágach—that is, the foster-father who had originally arranged the hero's suckling with his own wet-nurse Gabur according to a Compert Chon Culainn tradition (see Fig. 2; Thurneysen 1912: 43–48; cf. Guyonvarc'h and Le Roux 1965–1966)—who is also sometimes represented as Conall Cernach's maternal uncle.

Foster-brotherhood here scarcely proved thicker than blood kinship—once all social ties had been corrupted by betrayals to Conchobar as Ulster's elected tribal king. Only Cú Chulainn, the devoted gormac or fostered “sister's child” of the kingdom, manages to reverse disorder, like Lug, by exemplifying his duties of contractual allegiance. Ó Cathasaigh concludes: “[T]he relationship between sister's son and maternal kin . . . can be greatly beneficial to society, or greatly destructive of social order; the sister's son must be integrated into society by means of a solemn contract; and the social good will be served only if the obligations imposed by that contract are duly discharged by both sides. The social order of the sister's son can be summed up in the word goire [filial devotion], 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 “dutiful child,” was not a regular synonym for sister's son: it was a specific adoptive term, typically for the offspring of a female agnate taken into endowed fosterage and hence quasi-adoption by an heirless maternal relative.²⁰

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

Jaski therefore proposed that these legends more particularly comprised a morality play about duties of foster-kinship, highlighted by the hero's ambivalent outsider status, whereby “a clear message is conveyed: bonds of foster-kinship are beneficial if they are honoured, but lead to destruction if they are neglected, even if honour is at stake” (1999:27). Jaski's focus on foster-kinship in these legends thus complements Ó Cathasaigh's discernment of their moral juxtapositions of agnatic and matrilateral kinship, with which fosterage was entwined. Indeed, they dramatically apprehend problematic configurations of Eugene Hammel'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 enmities was portrayed by the primary narrator of the Táin Bó Cúailnge: Cú Chulainn's aite foster-father Fergus, beguiled by queen Medb to join her Connachta forces against Ulster, yet who secretly assists his fosterling and demands fair play in his combat. But other foster-kin of the hero, similarly seduced by Medb's promises of conquered land, or espousal of her daughter, agree to fight him: “Cú Chulainn regrets that they seek him out for combat, and appeals to their bond as foster-brothers and to their mutual affection. However, none of them retreats, and all share the same fate. Their deaths highlight the destructiveness 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 conscripts and sworn companions raised together in warrior training under Scáthach (cf. Wong 1993). Their disloyalty is therefore understandably contrasted with the firmer loyalty of aite foster-fathers like Fergus, contractually obliged to protect his dalta fosterling; or of Cú Chulainn's devoted milk-brother Lóeg, his ever faithful charioteer, taken away from the breast of his own mother so that the infant 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-brother Conall Cernach, who ultimately avenges the hero's death. Although infant suckling, nursing, and child fosterage were lexically conflated by this time, medieval Irish legends seem to have retained a moral partitioning of differential degrees of adoptive kinship through altram fosterage, where nurturant duties of adoptive parenthood and cliental allegiances of milk kinship remained fundamental.²¹

In a concise three-page article, Colin Ireland alerted precise attention to this hitherto neglected “Ambiguous Attitude toward Fosterage in Early Irish Literature” (1997). One maxim bluntly declared that “Fosterage should be impugned!” Another counseled, “Better a small kindred than a great deal of fosterage.” As Ireland comments, “By stressing the fine ‘kin, family group’ over the concept of altramm [fosterage] it appears to favour blood relationships to contractual ones.” An Old Irish triad cynically condemned all such precarious contracts: “Three dark things of the world: giving a thing into keeping, guaranteeing, fostering.” A treatise on princely education observed that “Every indecorous person is a fosterer,” and “Everyone is tranquil until it comes to fosterage.” Colin Ireland finally remarks that “this last statement suggests that keeping all parties involved in 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 reduced to abject penury by the profligate visits of his royal fosterling's brothers: prodigal princes whose perpetual hosting drives Buchet into destitute exile. Yet he is redeemed when his foster-daughter marries the king of Tara, rewarding her foster-father with her maritally endowed property (Charles-Edwards 1993: 81–82). Social parasitism by fostered lords and their noble kin—recalling those “ingrate cuckoos” of Gerald of Wales—is further evinced in a Welsh saying that it was among the “curses of a cenedl kindred” to have the son of a chieftain imposed upon it by coerced fosterage (Ellis 1982 I:385). Llinos Beverly Smith (1992:21f.) also noted medieval Welsh legends treating “the theme of jealousy and rivalry between natural brothers and the unholy alliance of foster-brothers,” inciting fratricidal feuding, as in the opening passage of Breuddwyd Rhonaby. While often sentimentally idealized, bonds of foster-kinship could thus 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 “four blameless killings” (Kelly 1988:89), Icelandic law prescribed rights of vengeance for foster-kin equivalent to cognate kin (Laws of Early Iceland 1980: 154f.). But in saga literature underlying inequalities of status and power are often highlighted. In the Laxdaela saga, the central character Dórdr was thus obliged to seek sanctuary from a powerful chieftain, Höskuldr, by abjectly taking his bastard son Oláfr into fosterage:

This convoluted family saga again juxtaposes Hammel's (1968) “alternative social structures” of kinship, alliance, and adoptive allegiance that we witnessed in Irish legends. The nurturant bond of foster-fatherhood persists in spite of enmities with natal kin; but ties of foster-brotherhood fail.²³

Ambivalence surrounding allegiances of fosterage was equally evident in Inal-Ipa's recorded recollections of the Abkhazian atalyk institution, as also portrayed in the Nart legends of the Caucasus. Heroic ideals of loyalty among milk kin were again highlighted by contrasted acts of horrifying treachery, “breast-profaning” rape, and other tyrannical abuses of status and power. Even popular fables of milk kinship with ogresses and cannibal giants evince this duplicity: subaltern child-heroes such as the Keloghlan Boy trick a supernatural being into treachery of her kind by a cunning performative act of symbolic adoption, furtively sucking her nipple from behind her back, or feeding a giant loaves secretly adulterated with breastmilk. This effectively fools these clumsy powers into complicity with the poor boy's quest, as with the hero Sasruquo and his giantess. But such tricked adoption seemed scarcely a responsible social contract; it was rather portrayed as a cunningly twisted inversion of cuckold kinship, a warped weapon of the weak.

James Scott's (1990) Gramscian perspectives on folklore would indicate that these popular tales of peasant cunning might encrypt “hidden transcripts” of a latently resistant political consciousness, ironically exposing the status inequalities disguised by foster kinship. Yet Inal-Ipa's Abkhazian ethnography showed its heroic idealization at least equivalent to its cynical deprecation in collective memory. Such ambivalent evaluation, contrasting real and ideal allegiances of foster-kinship, was equally evident in Irish and Icelandic legends, also counterposing contractual ties of fosterage with natal ties of consanguinity. Fosterage and milk kinship were again acknowledged to be somewhat fictitious devices of familial allegiance to superior powers, variously represented in fables and legends as supernatural monsters or as temporal lords. Yet these admittedly manipulated kinship ties were validated in legend as legitimate means of empowerment: the fostering vassal exploited internecine animosities among ruling status groups, just as the fostered Keloghlan Boy exploited feuding rivalries in the fabulous world of giants and cannibal ogres. The Oedipal fosterling, distributed as a child through all orders of society, thereby embraced these orders as his familial domain, albeit also often embracing their societal antinomies by his unnatural acts of familial incest and kin-slaying. As Scott (1976) originally argued, a traditional “moral economy” (or natural law) perforce respected reasonable reciprocities of contractual allegiance between innate status unequals: of patronal protection and of cliental support, as well as of communal solidarity in the face of tyranny, which ranked tributary polities even hegemonically demanded (cf. Reynolds 1984). The moral ambivalence of fosterage in this political context, troublesomely combining kinship loyalties with vassalic or villeinal duties, was therefore emblematic of an ambivalent political morality arguably inherent in segmentary-tributary polities (Parkes 2003: 768–71), which were integrated by means of such adoptive kinship.

Conclusion

This outline survey of narrative representations of allegiance fosterage appears to corroborate our earlier conjectures of its former prevalence and social significance in premodern Europe and Asia.²⁴

As Thomas Trautmann (1981:425) has indicated, dispersed or “extensive” rules of marital alliance in western Eurasia precluded possibilities of regularly consolidating familial allegiances of tributary rule, characteristic of segmentary states able to deploy “intensive” strategies of marital alliance (such as Dravidian kingdoms of South India). Rules of dispersed marital alliance, on the other hand, “give no opportunity to place marriage at the center of the web of political alliances” (1981:426; cf. J. Goody 1983:31–33). Adoptive kinship through fosterage, however, did provide an alternative opportunity for creating and perpetuating “intensive” webs of tributary allegiance. It was capable of regularly replicating linkages between ruling descent lines, as Gernet discerned in archaic Greece, and of extending these linkages as feudatory chains of unilateral alliance, as exemplified in the Hindu Kush and the Caucasus.²⁵

Ambivalence surrounding former political deployments of fosterage might also explain its neglect in historical and ethnographic scholarship.²⁷

The “unnaturalness” of these tributary foster-relations—delegating children to alien households for purposes of political allegiance—has therefore always been recognized. Foster-kinship might be dogmatically identified with consanguinity; for it thereby served as a means of substantively allying disparate status groups through clientelism disguised as kinship, with obvious benefits of secured protection and support for all parties in conditions of insecurity and episodic violence characteristic of segmentary-tributary polities. From a subaltern perspective, represented in popular fables, it was an allegiance that could be manipulated by cunning, as Sasruquo and other child heroes co-opted the powerful world of cannibal giants to their advantage by means of milk-kinship adoption. For dynastic rulers and local lords, it was a valuable mechanism of tributary control, mustering loyal support in their internecine struggles for supremacy, as Inal-Ipa amply documented in Abkhazia.²⁸

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

Acknowledgments: I am most grateful to Jan Bremmer, whose longstanding scholarship on fosterage 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 reviewers of CSSH, and to Tom Trautmann and David Akin for editorial assistance. This essay was written during academic study leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, United Kingdom. The Faculty of Social Science of the University of Kent awarded a grant for translation of Inal-Ipa (1956).