Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/152

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on disagreeable wives and liusbands ; some on trades and pro- fessions, in which all who follow them are fools or knaves ; and others on the inhabitants of various towns and villages. As in all Swiss song-collections, there are numerous courting-songs, called Kilt (or Chilt) Lieder. These take the form of a dialogue between a lover and a girl to whose window he comes at night. He begs to be let into the house, and most usually she refuses, warning him that her father and her mother are sleeping in the next room. We find precisely similar dialogues in the folk-songs of many other nations, and numerous British and German examples will at once come to our minds. The phraseology of all these songs follows certain conventional lines which point to some real connection between them in the past, and not merely to chance resemblance. Is it too much to hazard that in every land this class of song was originally intended to be used, as it is still used in Switzerland, during the Kil/gatig? According to this ancient Germanic custom, which is still com- monly practised in many parts of Europe,^ a suitor is authorised to court his sweetheart at her window after dark, often being finally admitted. In Switzerland the man and the girl sing the Kiltlied in dialogue, he standing below her window and she replying from within. There are also in Herr Grolimund's volume, as in other Swiss collections, specimens of the familiar dialogue between suitor and maiden, in which the one sets the other impossible tasks to perform, or riddles to solve, as a con- dition of marriage. Such dialogues, again, are found in the folk- song of almost every nation, and it is not wholly improbable that they may have originally formed part of an ancient marriage ceremony such as is still observed in Germanic countries, notably in the Salzburg district of Austria. There, the custom is that the bridegroom's emissary or Brautfiilirer rides forth with a company of armed comrades to conduct the bride to her new home, but must answer a long string of hard questions and riddles, put to him by the bride's father or his representative, before the bride is yielded up. The repeated reference in dialogue-songs of the kind

^ For references to the custom of the " Kiltgang" as practised in Scotland, Wales, Germany, the Dutch islands, etc., etc., see Die Hochzeitsbriiuche der Esien etc. etc. by Leopold von Schroeder, Berlin, 1888, p. 265.