Page:The Ballads of Marko Kraljević.djvu/228

 stiha) occurs in the "Ribanje" of Petar Hektorović (1556), but the earliest date that can be assigned to the poems in their decasyllabic form is the seventeenth century.

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787-1864) was born at Tršić of well-to-do peasant folk. His father's name was Stefan Joksimović and, following the Serb custom, the son bore the surname of Stefanović—Stefan's son. His parents had already lost several children so, as a measure of precaution, they bestowed on the boy the "prezime" of Vuk, a name supposed to be potent against the charms of witches and the Evil Eye. Vuk's childhood was spent with his peasant parents and he was thus familiar from the first with the life of the country folk. It was a primitive life, for conditions had remained unchanged since the Turkish conquest of the fifteenth century. The Turk, indeed, had played the part of wicked fairy, and in Serbia all cultural progress had been arrested as completely as in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty.

Neither of Vuk's parents could read, but the boy contrived to learn somehow, and his father sent him to the monastery of Tronoša in the hope that he might be able to further his studies there, but the experiment was not a success, the monks were entirely absorbed in the cultivation of their fields, and Vuk returned home to tend cattle.

While thus employed, he made ink for himself by dissolving gunpowder in water, and began to write down local songs and proverbs. This was the modest beginning of the great collections of folk-song with which his name is associated. In 1804, the year of the Serbian rising under Karageorge, Vuk took service with one of the patriot leaders. The Turks advanced, Tršić was burned to the ground, and Vuk's chief was killed.

For some years thereafter Vuk led a wandering life. We hear of him at Karlovatz gymnasium, at various places in Serbia, and finally at Belgrade where, as the result of a serious illness, he became permanently lame. "Upheld by crutches," he writes, "I could think no more of war and horses, yet had it not been for these same crutches I had surely been slain by the Turks, like so many of my contemporaries. Thanks to my crutches I had, perforce, to stay at home, and there I set down on paper what my ears had heard and what my eyes had seen." In 1813, when Karageorge made his escape over the Danube, Vuk fled also and settled in Vienna. At this time the remarkable body of Serbian songs and ballads which we now possess had not yet been committed to writing