324 BALKAN BALLADS

the other hand it may also be as old as the men's songs themselves,
since (though manuscript evidence is wanting) some early prose
that incorporates the sense of ballads of Kosovo gives, under re-
construction, heroic decasyllabics.1 The resemblance of a copy of
Serbian verse to the old heroic line of the French 'chansons de
geste' is striking, both because of the lofty intonation, and because
of the marked pause after the fourth syllable:

Rose so early Maiden of Kosovo,
rose so early on a Sunday morning,
first arose she e'er the sun had risen.

The difference is only that the French line is iambic (when it has
a demonstrable rhythm), but the Serbian is trochaic. The French
decasyllabic, however, was converted into the Italian hendeca-
syllable by the simple expedient of taking the 'feminine' line in-
stead of the'masculine' as normal, and in folk-verse this hendeca-
syllable tends to have a fixed pause after the fifth syllable. The
Italian line is felt to have a trochaic rhythm. By suppressing the
unaccented first syllable, the Serbian decasyllabic arises. There
seems little reason to doubt the western character of this line, and
that it came to Serbia by way of Italy and the Dalmatian towns.
It is a path marked down, as we shall see, by the traces of western
ballad themes which have penetrated into Yugoslavia and Greece.
One enters the 'junacke pesme' through the magnificent portal
of Kosovo. Traces of song can, of course, be followed through
allusions to a remote date, and there is even evidence that women's
songs—presumably of a lyrical cast—were already sung in approxi-
mately the modern manner in the thirteenth century. But it is the
men's songs that constitute the true ballads of this region, and their
succession opens almost abruptly with the national disaster in
1389. It has been plausibly represented, though it is by no means
certain, that one report in verse concerning this battle reached the
shores of the Black Sea before the year was out, and was there
heard by the deacon Ignatii and included in his Russian travel
diary.2 In the biography of Tsar Lazar's son by Constantine the
Philosopher (writing in 1431-2) we encounter the same religious
construction put upon the event as we find in the ballad of The

1 See the essays in reconstruction by M. Braun, Kosovoy Leipzig, 1937, pp.
3$ and 94.

3 See M. Braun, Kosovo, Leipzig, 1937. The texts are given in Helen
Rootham's Kossovof Oxford, 1920, accompanied by an excellent verse translation.