346 BALKAN BALLADS

culture. The Macedo-Rumanians in the south are to a large extent
nomad shepherds and mingle with Greeks and Slavs. They have
given the word * VlachJ to their neighbours' vocabularies. A Greek
'Vlachic song' (Politic 236) is composed from the standpoint of a
herdsman threatened by the klephts. The pastoral tinge is the most
characteristic feature of all the best Rumanian ballads, and is their
special note in the concert of European folk-poetry. The shepherds
(ciobani) have for neighbours the haiduks, as in Bulgaria; the
seasons govern them both with equal severity, and any chance may
cause them to change from the one class to the other. A third
group of Rumanians—those of Ardeal or Transylvania—took the
lead in written literature under the influence of the Reformation
and of their neighbours the Saxons of Siebenbiirgen. Thanks to
them the Rumanians were exposed to western cultural influences
of a German type, and it was doubtless also due to them that the
'lautari' learned to rhyme. In the last place, the separation between
lyric and narrative, which had been set up in Yugoslavia and ob-
served fairly well in Bulgaria, was obscured in Rumania. The
'balade'—or rather, to give them their popular name, 'cantece
batranesti' 'old songs'—are narratives impregnated with lyricism.
The clue to Rumanian folk-poetry is thus provided by the lyrics,
and these may be much older than narrative verse. The favoured
lyrical form is the 'doina'. In one case, it is true, we may see how
a narrative has degenerated into a lyric; that has been the fate of
the finest of Rumanian ballads, Miorita, in Transylvania. Such a
transformation would not necessarily prove that the narrative man-
ner is, in all other instances, the older. Existing 'doine' express
timeless, nameless emotions, and give no hint of the causes of their
begetting. The bulk of them are doubtless quite recent im-
provisations. A few short lines suffice; the singer unburdens his
heart by the mere act of singing:

The wind of Spring blows on the moors

as I sing doine out of doors;

to soothe my soul my song avails

mid flowerets and nightingales.

When winter comes tempestuous,

I sing my doine shut in house,

to fill the daytime with delight,

the daytime and the weary night.1

1 C. Tagliavini, Antologia Rumena> Heidelberg, 1923, No. 95 (a).