74 HOW BALLADS SPREAD

the other Scottish; the same is true of the English Sir Aldmgar
and the Scottish Sir Hugh le Blond. A short and undoubtedly in-
complete list shows me 181 Viser' which occur in more than one
of the Scandinavian countries; the total number of Viser' is about
600. In the German area it is not feasible to mark off the ballads
of High Germany from Low Germany, or to separate the Flemish
and Dutch ballads from the main body, or the Swiss from the rest.
All that one can do is to recognize that certain pieces bear the
marks of Flemish, German, or Swiss origin, and that others have
continued to be sung within a narrow area. The unity of Serbian
and Bulgarian ballads is attested by more than a score of Bulgarian
pieces on the Serbian hero Marko Kraljevic, not to mention other
coincidental ballads. The same is true of international relations in
Franco-Italian balladry; it is the same ballad of Francois Fs im-
prisonment that circulates in France and Piedmont. The French
Porcheronne, Provencal Porcheireto, and Catalan Noble Porquera
are merely variants of the same thing. Portuguese and Castilian
ballads are found to agree, and Castilian and Catalan. Wherever
there is no difficult frontier of language or culture to surmount,
traditional ballads are able to travel from mouth to mouth without
impediment. The dialect used for their performance takes on
slowly new characteristics as the song passes over the ground, until
it may reach the limits of the linguistic area. It is not translation
but substitution that occurs. The substitution may be left in-
complete when the original is sufficiently understood. One may
see this state of language in the Castilian-Catalan ballads, or in the
Faeroese Nykkurs visa, several verses of which are in the original
Danish. Borrowing, not spontaneous creation, in such cases is the
rule.

The words of ballads are, in fact, complexes of motifs just as
their tunes are complexes of notes. The chances against fortuitous
coincidence in the words are scarcely less heavy than against for-
tuitous coincidence in melody. These two aspects of the full per-
formance have each their history of rise, expansion, and decline.

Tannhamer is a ballad of which the history is singularly easy to
trace, thanks to its literary connexions. The minnesinger so called
lived from about 1200 to 1268 and was a contemporary, as the
ballad asserts, of Pope Urban IV (1261-4). The connexion with
the Venusberg or Sibyl's Paradise must have been made in the
fifteenth century, since we first hear of the Paradise from Antoine