Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 31.djvu/301

Rh of the schools, who collected a large part of the material, it was not thought wise to give the names of composers. Whether some of the decimas and longer Christmas carols are printed in Porto Rico in the local newspapers, or privately, I do not know. In New Mexico many of the popular modern ballad-like compositions and decimas that treat of deaths, public calamities, and the like, are frequently printed in the local newspapers, and thus become popular. In Chile the decimas are also well known; but most of those collected and published by Lenz are of known authorship, and seem less popular than in Porto Rico. As in New Mexico, however, they adhere more closely to a fixed traditional form, as we shall show in another part of this article.

The extraordinary interest which one finds in the poetical compositions under consideration, including also the aguinaldos, lies in the metrical problems involved. We have already stated that the hexasyllabic metre, so popular in Porto Rico, is by no means the most popular Spanish metre. From early times to the present day the popular Spanish metre, both in learned and popular poetry, has been the octosyllabic. It seems to be the metre of the lost epics, and appears in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the ballad metre. From the ballads it passed to the classic drama, and since the end of the sixteenth century it has reigned supreme in learned and popular poetry alike. The reasons for the popularity of other metres in modern Spanish folk-poetry are to be found in the isolation or close contact of the various regions of the Spanish-speaking world, as the case may be. It is clear to me that the great popularity of the octosyllabic verse in New Mexico is quite in line with the strength of Old-Spanish tradition there in all matters. The ballads from New Mexico, the riddles, and other materials, show greater signs of archaism than the ballads and other materials from any other place, for the simple reason that Spanish tradition in New Mexico represents an older stage. In fact, New Mexico has been isolated, and has lived independently of Peninsular-Spanish tradition, for over three centuries. In the South-American countries and Mexico the case is quite different, and in Porto Rico it is safe to assume that modem Spanish tradition has been in continual contact with that of the mother country to the present day. The ballad of Alfonso Doce, for example, an adaptation of an old Spanish ballad of the sixteenth century, is found in Mexico, Cuba, and Porto Rico; but the version from New Mexico has nothing to do with these, and is a real traditional version of the old ballad. The old