7o KINDS AND DATES

century doubtless witnessed the invasion of Catalonia by pieces
different in style from the older Franco-Provensal popular songs.
They are sometimes in Castilian only, but more often in a mixture
of Castilian and Catalan. The Castilian historical 'romances',
defined as above, take us back to the Civil Wars which established
the House of Trastamara in the second half of the fourteenth cen-
tury. One of them has preserved an ancient slander, like a fly in
amber, and either two or three were used by the chancellor Pero
Lopez de Ayala in his chronicles before 1394.z The frontier
ballads present a continuous sequence from the year 1407, and the
oldest known adventure ballad can be encountered in a mixed
Castilian and Catalan form about the year 1421.2 The middle
years of the fourteenth century are also the time indicated by a
comparison of the traditional epics and the epical ballads.

In the Baltic regions it is possible to make out a case for the
antiquity of Finnish ballads on the basis of one piece with a twelfth-
century subject, and the use of mythological and magical motifs.
I am unable to estimate the strength of such evidence, since an
ecclesiastical legend does not always imply continuous popular
verse traditions, and the use of pagan motifs depends on the dura-
tion of practising or virtual paganism among the Finnish country
folk. In Lithuania the mythology may easily be quite modern.
The songs are generally too lyrical to admit of dates, but there is
one memory of the ravages and cruelties of the Teutonic Knights,
which carries us back to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries.
Soldiers' songs contain historical allusions from. 1700 onwards.
The practice of singing may, of course, be very much older than
these dates, and the word 'daina' means merely 'song'; but 'dainos'
of the present form and content seem unlikely to go farther back
than the later Middle Ages. The form, I believe, is an import from
Germany, with Lithuanian modifications.

Some of the ballad novelettes also indicate dates. Tannhauser is
not older than Tannhauser himself; indeed, the motifs belong to
the fifteenth century. The noble Moringer uses the name of the
twelfth-century Heinrich von Morungen. The two pieces imply
that the 'aubade' or Tageslied' had already descended from courtly

* See W. J. Entwistie, 'Romancero del Key don Pedro', Modern Language
Review, xxv, 1930.

' E. Levi, 'El romance florentino de Jaume de Olesa', Revista de Filologia
j&spanola, xiv, 1927.