Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/92

lxxxvi Ixxxvi INTRODUCTION, hand, dances about the room, and invites the whole assembly to join.^ Evidently, this is a very elaborate aifair, and for more primitive relations we may certainly suppose the entire crowd singing to their own steps.^ Again, as in Icelandic ballads,^ we may think of the leader singing an initial stanza, which the crowd con- tinue to sing as burden or accompaniment to the new verses of the leader ; a long burden, overlapping the stanza, would be partly heard as a refrain. However all this may have been, the refrain was sung by the throng, and means more and more as we approach primitive relations. In later ballads the refrain bears a lyrical character, and seems to express the tone or motive of the whole piece, or even forms a part of the story.* Often it merely states the time of year, reminding one distantly of the beautiful stanzas which open such a ballad as "Robin Hood and the Monk"; or else a double refrain could combine the season of the year with the mood and feeling of the narrative. There is also a merely interjectional refrain, not found in Danish ballads, but common in German, the Ha! or Ejat which was once, in all probability, an outcry of some sort at the dance.* It is instructive to note more developed forms of this outcry, — what a French writer has called the refrains par onomatoptes^ — as well as the half-intelligible, half-interjectional "refrain without a song." Whatever the nature of the refrain, it was sung by the crowd. Talvj admits this ; ® but at the same time wrongly 1 Neocorus, Chroniky ed. Dahlmann, I, 177. ^Bohme, Tanzy p. 229. 3 See The Elfin Knighty and Professor ChUd's note, Ballads, I, 7. II, i, 728. 5 Steenstrup, p. 78 ; Uhland, Schr.y III, 392 f. ; Tiersot, Chanson Populairey p. I24f. ® Characteristiky p. 335 f. Digitized by LjOOQIC
 * Steenstrup, as quoted above. Lundell, in Paul's Grundrissy