Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/72

 48 them, partly Low-German, partly Scandinavian, superimposed upon a Celtic basis, Gaelic in parts, but mainly Brythonic, with a substratum of Pictish and other unknown elements. The country in which the ballads were chiefly found offered, in its material and social conditions, a soil admirably suited for their germination and growth. A wild, trackless March-land, a fierce, passionate, daring breed of men, with tenacious national and family feuds, with undiminished energy of primitive passion—the very conditions, in fact, we could postulate from the ballads themselves, had they come down to us without note of their locality and surroundings. In how far are the conflicting racial, in how far the conflicting political and social elements responsible for the ballads? The problem is not lessened in complexity by the fact that much of our English ballad literature is made up of incidents to which close parallels can be found in the romantic ballads of the Scandinavians (Danes and Faroese islanders), of the Slaves (Wends), and of neo-Latin peoples (French, Italians, North Spaniards), and that in all these various bodies of folk-poetry there occur not only similar themes, but marked similarity in their literary treatment. The ballads extant in English are, as a rule, greatly superior to their Continental similars, and there exist a considerable number certainly peculiar to and having their undoubted origin in the English-speaking area, which exhibit the same merits of conception and style.

In the northern portion of the English-speaking area of Britain, roughly speaking between Humber and Clyde, the presence of a considerable Celtic and Scandinavian element is, I would urge, a dominant factor in the production of our corpus of ballad poetry. Either element would supply a number of folk-singers rigidly trained and schooled, familiar with traditional romance, full of conventional formulas belonging to an archaic stage of literature. Stories of love and hate, of faerie and wizardry, would appeal to them, and their surroundings would foster the