2S WHAT IS A BALLAD?

These are the elements of traditional art.J Composed in common
form, the ballad becomes at once common property, like a fairy-
tale or legend. The author has no copyright, and the ballad only
exists by virtue of each successive performance when it is what the
performer makes it. It is not that ballads were, as the Romantics
insisted, the product of the community working as a creator.
Artistic creation under such conditions would be impossible; each
ballad has its author and its moment of birth. On both these points
we have information in respect of a number of ballads in different
countries. We learn, in Spain, that Garcilaso de la Vega performed
a remarkable feat of arms in the year 1455, on the nth July, and
that became the subject of a ballad; and that the conversation
between Juan II and Prince Yusuf of Granada, reported in
Abetidmar, Abendmar, occurred on June ayth, 1431. In 1491 Queen
Isabel the Catholic ordered her confessor, Fray Ambrosio Monte-
sinos, to compose a ballad on the death of Prince Afonso of
Portugal; the ballad survives and is in the veritable traditional style.
The names of Alonso de Salaya, Pedro de Palma, Diego de Zamora,
and Juan de Leyva, preserved by flying leaves of the sixteenth
century, are as likely to refer to composers as to performers. In a
number of French and German pieces of a domestic and somewhat
vulgar type it was an established convention to indicate the real or
putative authors by some description. The formula is: 'if you wish
to know who made this song, it was made by three maidens' or
4an apprentice* or 'a soldier', &c. In 1812 F. L. Jahn visited
Ferdinand August and commissioned a satirical ballad on the ruin
of the Grande Armee. He gave a few phrases, such as 'cuirassiers
in frocks* and 'ensigns without ensigns' and the opening couplet:
'With man and horse and wagon, so has the Lord them stricken/
August composed six verses which became popular for their
vigorous scorn, and they were adapted in 1871 to Bourbaki's
retreat into Switzerland. About 1830 Jens Christian Djurhuus, a
crofter from Kollefjord in the Faeroe Islands, borrowed a copy of
the Saga, of St. Olafto excavate from it new material for the dance.
In the method of composition his Ormurin langi and Longfellow's
Building of the Long Serpent are identical; but the one is personal
poetry, the other is an excellent example of traditional balladry.

There is no personal right arrogated by such authors over their "
work, which is the absolute property of each reciter, to shorten,

1 See R. Men6ndez Pidal, Poesia popular y Poesia traditional, Oxford, 1922.