4 PEOPLE AND POETS

centred communities, depending for entertainment on their voices
and ears. The German armies have been particularly rich in lyrics
and ballads. In those of Austria the same events or recurrent
situations are recorded in German, Czech, Hungarian, Rumanian,
and Croat songs; and there is a soldiers' section in the ballad col-
lections of Poland, Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, due to service
in the Russian army. The ballads express the peasant's dislike
of conscription and the exile it causes, the march to a frontier,
some desperate defence, the soldier's dying testament associated
now with one battle, now the other, the sad or joyful return
home. These professional songs are the direct descendants of
those sung by reiters and landsknechts in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, and by Swiss pikemen in the fourteenth and
fifteenth.

The Faeroe Islands may be classed as a remote community, but
their flourishing cult of the ballad in our day has this additional
feature; it is common to the entire population.1 New songs are
required for the festival of the patron saint and other important
dates, and they are multiplied by the convention that the same
words should not be used twice in a year. The demand for new
matter is satisfied by importing ballads from Denmark and Norway,
either in the original or in translation, and by excavating new
ballads from Icelandic sagas. As late as the year 1830 a bonder
named Djurhuus composed his Long Serpent (Ormurin langi] from
materials in the Saga of St. Olaf, and it was not committed to
print until 1884. Curiously enough, the equally remote and self-
sufficing community of the Icelanders has shown indifference to
the ballads, being wholly devoted to the cult of an elaborate
rhetorical form: the 'rimur'.2 The poetry of the Gael has also
developed under a strict discipline in bardic schools. These were,
says one authority,3

the university system of the nation—granting degrees, or what corre-
sponded to such, and bestowing privileges on both professors and
students simply because they were professors and students.

He goes on to remark that 'one searches Europe in vain for the

l See the classical description in V, U. Hammershaimb, Far0sk AnthologL

Copenhagen, 1891. s '

•See Sir William Craigie's Taylorian lecture, The Art of Poetry in Iceland,
Oxford, 1937, and Skotlands Rimur, Oxford, 1908
3 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland, Dublin, 1925, p. 63.