GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 207

the different forms of a Scandinavian ballad or even between
Scandinavia and Scotland. The influence of France is differently
exerted, and more directly; the epical ballads depend on re-
fashioned German epics, not on sagas or the Edda. The ballads
of Low Germany are older and more international; from High
Germany a powerful literary influence was exerted by the Minne-
singers and Mastersingers, and Switzerland is the home of patriotic
military narratives. The use of narrative is more marked in the
Middle Ages; later ballads become more lyrical, and personal or
domestic. These later characteristics mark the ballads of countries
dependent on the German creative urge, w7hich was exerted in
three different directions towards the east. In a south-easterly
direction the German ballad type of construction and theme pene-
trated Czechoslovakia and Hungary about the fifteenth century;
beyond Hungary the Rumanians learned to assonate in couplets,
though they owe inspiration chiefly to their Balkan neighbours. In
an easterly direction, the ballads of the Lusatian Wends are Ger-
man in form, partly in music, and (in all international ballads) in
content and exposition. Rhyming couplets and quatrains are found
in Polish Galicia, in the narrative verse of the Ruthenians. Their
kinsmen of the Ukraine adopted this same style in place of the more
irregular verse of the 'byliny* and ' dumi*. It was a substitution of
the western assonance and themes for the indigenous tradition, and
a break with the old poetry of Kiev, which has since survived only
outside the Ukraine. To the north-east the German influence is
notable in the almost purely lyrical verse of Poland proper. It
extends into Lithuania and Latvia, where themes are lyrical and
personal or domestic; where assonance is abundant, but too spora-
dic to be a principle of versification, and where the construction is
(thanks to parallelism) definitely stanzaic. In Latvia these stanzas
are often reduced to one, so that there is no repetition to show that
the construction is stanzaic; the length of the line is normally of
eight syllables. In Finland and Esthonia, popular traditional poetry
employs eight-syllable unrhymed lines upon themes generally
domestic or personal, with casual assonance and abundant allitera-
tion. Parallelism is used to form groups of lines of approximately
equal numbers, though there are no stanzas. The singers are now
peasants and fishers, as in Lithuania, but there is abundant evi-
dence that their art came at some earlier date from the coastal
towns, where German influence was strong. In Finland these