322 BALKAN BALLADS

monotonous chant is heard in the men's songs of the whole moun-
tainous region. The range of notes is narrow, and their intervals
not those of the west. In Bulgaria a new, more ornamented style
occurs, more akin to the modern Greek ballad chant. There are
the characteristic irregular intervals, and quarter-tones and third-
tones as well as semitones. But it is particularly in flourishes and
rapid improvisations that the two styles differ. They are found
together in the valleys of the Serbian rivers, especially in the
Vardar basin. Two waves of Greek music have followed the same
course from east to west, but the second has not reached the limits
of the first. The men chant in the high mountains, and reckon to
leave singing to the women; to the women belongs also the sole use
of the round dance.

This distinction between women's songs (zenske pesme) and
men's or warriors' songs (junacke pesme) is fundamental in
Serbian balladry. It was made by V. S. Karadzic, and serves to
mark off lyrics from narratives, and love-songs from martial
adventures. It is the men's songs that concern us in this study,
since they are the ballads which our definition seeks. But the
distinction is not absolute: there were love-narratives which
Karadzic himself did not know how to classify, and indeed the
distinction in some cases is rather by religion than by sex. Bride-
stealing is one of the main themes of the men's songs, and is
associated with the most august names of Serbian history; but a
ballad of bride-stealing is a kind of love-song. The harassed
mountaineers could hardly woo in any other form; but the peaceful
Yugoslav Moslems—the Omer of the ballads and others like him—
could woo and wilt in a more feminine way. Between the men's
narratives and the women's lyrics there thus lies a middle region of
love-tales suited to either sex. None the less, the broad distinction
between men's songs and women's holds throughout Yugoslav
oral verse, and it justifies the attention given by students of the
ballad to the 'junacke pesme5 in isolation.

A very large number of metres are used for women's songs,
including the heroic decasyllabic of the men. There is a lyric

Paris, 1929. The whole social background is etched by M. Braun, *Zur Frage
des Heldenliedes bei den Serbokroaten5, and M. Braun and T. Frings in 'Helden-
lied', both articles published in Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und
Literatur, lix, 1935. F. Saran discusses the prosody of Serbian verse in Zur
Metrik des epischen Verses der Serben, Leipzig, 1934, referring to the decasyllabic
only.