KINDS AND DATES

HISTORICAL ballads form a class which it is comparatively
easy to separate from all others. They arise immediately out
of the events they narrate, not later than within the memory of
living men. Any corpus which is rich in ballads of this kind offers
an easy and sure chronology; for not only are the events datable,
but there are often other lines of testimony as to the age of the
ballad. It may, for instance, have provided material for a chronicle
or be the subject of an allusion. In the older strata of European
balladry, historical pieces are, like narratives in general, copious;
and the earliest dates they imply are as old as any that can be fixed
for the genre itself. In the course of time historical ballads die out
more rapidly than others, and they are seldom passed on to other
nations. If they migrate (as the French ballads on Francois Fs
imprisonment and Gabrielle d'Estrees's death have passed to Italy
and Germany), this will generally be due to their novelesque or
emotional interest, or to the charm of a tune. Because they are
perishable and stationary elements of the older epochs of balladry,
they are not abundant in ballad corpora of secondary formation.
Their absence is one of the signs of dependence, as of Bohemia on
Germany and Bulgaria on Serbia.

National themes are encountered among such ballads in episodic
or personal aspects. The ballad does not compete with the epic
poem. More often the theme is partisan or local rather than
national: civil wars and frontier defence. The pieces may cohere
round the name of a national hero, like Marko Kraljevic and Marsk
Stig; and in such a case the historical element may become ex-
ceedingly tenuous. In Russia there were persons known as
Dobrynja Nikitic, Aljosa Popovic, Vladimir, &c., and that is almost
all that is historical in the Kiev cycle. One may then justly doubt
whether these 'byliny' should be classed as historical at all, or
merely as adventurous. They are accepted as historical by the
hearers, who are not much preoccupied with the accuracy of the
details. On a somewhat lower scale are those ballads which take
for heroes the persons of outlaws, haiduks, klephts, robber barons,
bandits, murderers, and plain thieves; and these, too, have their
descending order of merit. At the one end of the scale we encounter