Page:The Ballads of Marko Kraljević.djvu/46

 where today, all knowledge of the older forms has vanished completely from the popular memory and hitherto no satisfactory account has been given of how or when they thus sunk into oblivion. The decasyllabic poems as chanted today have been classified under the following groups or cycles:

(a) Non-historical. A small group consisting of fairy-tales and of Christian and pre-Christian legends.

(b) Historical. A very large group containing the following ballad-cycles:

The history of the decasyllabic verse is obscure and difficult to trace. Professor Popović is of opinion that it did not derive directly from the sixteen-syllable line, but sprang originally from a now forgotten intermediate form of eleven or twelve syllables which had borrowed certain themes from the longer metres. The decasyllabic ballad appears to have arisen among the Uskoks of the Coastland, not earlier than the seventeenth century. Thence, adding to itself in its progress, it passed successively to Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro, and so at last into Serbia where, with the ballads of the great rising against the Turks, the truly national poetry was brilliantly completed and rounded off. The wheel had thus come full circle and the story of the traditional folk-song ends in the country where in its older form it had had its birth.