Love, marriage … and a barrage of shoes

Shoe-throwing may now be mostly a political act. But not long ago, it was a common rite of marriage, writes James Crombie of Aberdeen, who has gathered some matrimonial footwear-hurling facts into a 24-page treatise called Shoe-Throwing at Weddings.

This was in 1895, when readers may have empathised with Crombie’s opening thought: “Pelting a bride and bridegroom with old shoes when they start on their honeymoon is a custom we are all familiar with, and in which many of us have participated.”

Some 113 years later, in 2008, Muntazer al-Zaidi recategorised the social role of shoe-throwing when he hurled size-10 shoes, and some words (“This is your farewell kiss, you dog”), at US president George W Bush at a press conference in Baghdad.

Crombie’s article is pretty apolitical, and makes no bows to podiatrical correctness. Though his paper was published in the journal Folklore, Crombie was no worshipper of footloose or flighty tales. He helped establish the first seismological observatory in the Aberdeen area and was a generous donor to Oxford Observatory.

Crombie writes that around the world lots of people make a practice of throwing something at newlyweds. Rice, especially, has had wide popularity.

Victorians put their best foot forward in the choice of missile, Crombie writes: “For whereas we find the custom of throwing rice, or some other cereal, prevalent in almost every land, we find shoe-throwing practised mainly, I think, in those parts of the world inhabited by Englishmen or directly influenced by them, among the wandering Gypsies of Transylvania, some parts of India, and one or two other places.”

Nuptial bombardment is meant to induce luck, he says. Sometimes it summons more than luck. Crombie points to the large Indonesian island of Celebes (now called Sulawesi). “At South Celebes,” he writes, “rice is thrown on the head of anyone in whose honour a festival is held, with the object of detaining the soul, which at such times is in especial danger of being lured away by envious demons.”

Shoes, he writes, are sometimes essential wedding elements even when hand-delivered rather than heaved – especially in Germany and Finland. “According to a sumptuary law of Hamburg, enacted in 1291, the bridegroom was bound to present the bride with a pair. They almost played the part of our engagement ring and were, as it were, evidence of betrothal.”

And in his own era, in east Finland, Crombie says, a mother-in-law would not permit her new son-in-law to bed his bride until the young man had presented the mother-in-law with a pair of shoes.

Shoes, he tells us, can also be essential, symbolically, at the end of a marriage. “A Bedouin form of divorce,” Crombie reports, is, “she is my slipper, I have cast her off.”