Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/83

Rh INTRODUCTION, Ixxvii like that of our own ballads, have long been used for the dance, and are often variations of the old sagas. ^ Something of the same sort, too, is told of dwellers on the Cimbrian peninsula. Writing in 1652, Giesebrecht remarks ^ that this folk still loved to dance to songs of battle and conquest ; while earlier yet, we have the well known account of Neocorus,^ much to the same effect. This chronicler, a priest who writes at the beginning of the seventeenth century, is full of wonder at the way in which unschooled peasants answer every poetic demand, be it grave or merry. One gathers that their favorite ballads for the dance were of the traditional and heroic kind. As the Faroe islanders still sang of Sigurd, so the Cimbrian peasants loved a story of their own victory in warfare against overwhelming odds. * From the neighboring Frisians, too, we have a ballad, said to be the only real song of antiquity which the race has preserved ; * and to this solitary song they were wont, two centuries ago, to tread their only national dance. The dramatic 1 The rimur were narrative, the mansongr^ to be noted below, were lyric. From the fourteenth century, these rimur were almost the only poetry known in Iceland, until our own century, — excluding, of course, clerical religious verse. See Th. Mobius in Ergdnzungs- band of Zacher's Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologies 1874, p. 60. 2 Quoted by Miillenhoff, Sagen^ u. s. w., p. xxii f. 8 Chronik, ed. Dahlmann, I, 176 f ; II, 559 ff. ballads on the battle of Hemmingstede (1500), at p. 59 ff., which were avowedly used for the national dance. In regard to lighter ballads of this folk (see Bohme, Altd. Liederb.y p. 375 ff.), one may question the inference of Vogt (Paul's Grundrissy II, i, 372) that the presence of mother, daughter and knight in the " springtanz," proves this ballad to be direct copying of Neidhart's well known peasant-dances, and not a result of the same impulse which found expression in these dances. The mania for " sources " knows no limit. ^ S^, for words and music, Bohme, Altd. Liederb.^ p. 378 f. Digitized by LjOOQIC
 * See also Miillenhoff, Sagen^ pp. xxv, xxx, xxxv, as well as the