Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/77

INTRODUCTION. Ixxi fourteenth century down to the beginning of our own ; but the Anglo-Saxon ballads are matter of inference. That Angles and Saxons had ballads, says Brandl,^ in a pithy phrase, " is not to be denied if we consider human nature, and not to be affirmed if we consider our present sources of information." Certainly, so far as form is concerned, the ballads are quite opposed to that poetry handed down to us by the monks who controlled our literature before the conquest ; though we find ample evidence that poems in character and contents analogous to the later ballad were sung in Saxon England. This cataclysm and breach in traditions was not peculiar to Great Britain. Steenstrup concludes that there is no connection between the Scandinavian ballads, which are like ours in form as well as matter, and the heroic poems of the Edda. We can hardly doubt that English ballads could be traced back in an unbroken chain to the primitive Germanic song ; but we have lost important links of the chain.* What we must do, when we find it ^ PauPs Grundrissj II, i, 840. Merbot {Aesthetische Studien zur Ags, Poesie^ Breslau, 1883, p. 19 ff., and especially p. 31) gives a list of words used by the Anglo-Saxons for different kinds of poetry, admits the difficulty of drawing conclusions from a language which rioted in synonyms, and yet concedes that a mass of occasional poetry {bismerUo^, brydUoi^y etc.) may be inferred, of which we have no actual remains. ^ Sievers, as is well known, has explained Anglo-Saxon metre as a recited verse, as spree hvortrag, compared with the far older Germanic verse, which was sung, and naturally had stanzaic form. This epic verse of the Anglo-Saxon poets was the only form which the monks preserved as literature, but it is probable that the people sang their songs in the old fashion. Luick (Paul's Grundriss^ II, i, 998) assumes that the beginnings of the English riming couplet may be regarded as the Old-Germanic verse for singing {altgertnanischen taktierenden Gesangvers) revived for literary purposes. It is no easy question ; but one may at least fancy some such explanation for the underground river of balladry. * Digitized by LjOOQIC