superstitions, including the one that Joseph II. had not died but gone to Berlin and would return to exterminate the Roman Catholic faith utterly, the main value of the work is as a picture of the life of the countryman and countryside in the eighteenth century by an extraordinarily many-sided man.
15. I. How folk songs are circulated.
Epic and ballad poetry show astonishing parallelisms, which suggest that we have to do with variants of one original. So too with folk songs. He is specially concerned with Western Slav forms.
You must assume direct borrowing, and yet the method is not easy to explain and justify. He takes examples from an article on "Czech and Slovak Folk Songs" in the Warsaw Dzwon Literacki, of 1847, by O. Kolberg, the great Polish collector of ballad poetry. Apart from errors of language-classification (Slovak as a Bohemized Polish dialect! etc.), he proceeds to set out Kolberg's examples, taken down in Warsaw from Slovak wiredrawers[1] who spend the winter in the borders of German and Slavonic lands. Sreznevsky made similar collections from a similar source.
There are twenty-one songs, of which he prints a considerable part of the text of the last:
To je kratké—to je dluhe.
To stolica rézacy,
To sou skrypki—to sou basy,
To slepota pohazy, etc.
In a supplement Kolberg gave the melodies and illustrations which enable slepota in the first stanza to be corrected to slepica. The song is well known to Bohemians, but the text actually got to the far North, the White Russian Polesie, the land about the Pripet. This was reported by Jan Karłowicz in Wiłsa (ii. 849). The language is mixed, having been brought by so-called "Hungarian" women, i.e. Slovaks, to Białorus. The White Russian text runs:
Basy skrypki długi krótki,
Tu stolica Reczyca,
Hak, ptak, pahaniàk,
Choine, widła gnojne, etc.
- ↑ Dróciarz is wiredrawer, but some derivatives of drót mean knitting, etc. (ó=u).
