[ xix ]
to group the heroic songs together so as to form, if possible, some sort of coherent sequence. Vuk had already attempted to arrange the Marko ballads[1]. Vogl made a more ambitious effort in the same direction, supplementing Vuk's material with other Marko songs from Milutinović, and the method was pushed to its logical conclusion by Kapper who, in his Lazar der Serbencar, knit together the ballads of the Kossovo cycle and produced therefrom a single complete poem[2].
Before our eyes, as it were, we have a demonstration of the genesis of an epic. It is true that Kapper's Lazar is an artificial product. The conditions essential to the birth, or rebirth, of the epic were passing rapidly away, but it is as certain as such things can be that if the Turkish dominion had endured a century or two longer, the separate ballads of the Kossovo cycle chanted by the Serbian guslari would have fused together as did the Nibelungen songs of the Germanic Spielleute[3].
In 1859 the French consul at Belgrade published a remarkable book entitled Poésies populaires serbes, consisting of a line-by-line non-metrical rendering of five Kossovo songs, twelve Marko ballads in prose[4], a number of Hajduk pieces, a selection of seven heroic poems and some of the so-called "domestic" or "family"
- ↑ A very difficult task. See below, note 3.
- ↑ Kapper had a Serbian predecessor in the person of Joxim Nović-Otoćanin who published his Lazarica at Novi Sad (Neusatz) in 1847. The name "Lazarica" has since been generally adopted to denote the Kossovo cycle.
- ↑ In the Kossovo cycle there is a definite chronological sequence of events highly favourable to the ultimate union of the fragments into a coherent whole.
The Marko ballads, on the other hand, resist such treatment. It is difficult to establish any satisfactory progression in time and equally difficult to arrange the stories so as to trace any development in Marko's character. It may be that the epic ballads as we have them now are merely recast fragments of longer epic poems now lost. If so then the modern attempts to join up these fragments are in the nature of a reversal of the process of disintegration.
- ↑ 1. Ouroch et les Merniavtchévitch.
2. Marko et la Vila.
3. Marko et le faucon.
4. Les noces de Marko.
