Why does the groom carry the bride over the threshold?
The custom of carrying a bride over the threshold goes back at least to ancient Rome, and the oldest explanation for it is not romantic at all. The Greek writer Plutarch, describing Roman customs, said Roman brides were lifted into their new homes because the first Roman wives had been carried in by force. In his day it was not even the groom who did the lifting.
Plutarch’s question
Plutarch wrote a curious little book called Roman Questions, a list of Roman customs and his guesses about their origins. Question 29 asks: “Why do they not allow the bride to cross the threshold of her home herself, but those who are escorting her lift her over?”
Notice who does the lifting: “those who are escorting her”, the wedding party, not the husband. Plutarch offers three possible answers, and he does not choose between them.
Three Roman answers
The first is historical. “Is it because they carried off by force also the first Roman brides and bore them in in this manner, and the women did not enter of their own accord?” This refers to the legend of the Sabine women, whom the men of early Rome were said to have abducted to find themselves wives.
The second is about modesty. Perhaps, Plutarch suggests, the custom made it look as if the bride entered “under constraint and not of their own desire” a home where she was about to lose her virginity.
Добавить в заметки чтобы посмотреть позже?The third is about permanence. The lifting might be “a token that the woman may not go forth of her own accord and abandon her home if she be not constrained, just as it was under constraint that she entered it.” He compares a custom from his own region of Greece, Boeotia, where people burned the axle of the bridal carriage in front of the door, “signifying that the bride must remain, since her means of departure has been destroyed.”
The Sabine story again
In his Life of Romulus, Plutarch returns to the custom and this time sounds surer. It “continues to be a custom down to the present time that the bride shall not of herself cross the threshold into her new home, but be lifted up and carried in, because the Sabine women were carried in by force, and did not go in of their own accord.”
The Roman poet Catullus, in one of his wedding songs, also makes the threshold a moment of ceremony. His Latin line transfer omine cum bono limen aureolos pedes asks the bride, in a literal translation, to carry her little golden feet over the threshold with a good omen.
What about bad luck?
You will also hear a different reason today: a bride who trips on the threshold brings bad luck, or evil spirits lurk at the door. We could not find an old source for either idea. Plutarch talks about force, modesty and staying put. Catullus asks for a good omen at the door, which is the nearest the Roman texts come to luck, but neither mentions stumbling or spirits.
The custom changed hands over the centuries. In Rome the escorts lifted the bride; today the groom does it. The reason Plutarch gave for it has mostly been forgotten.