We have brought you a branch of May.
‘A branch of May we have brought you,
And at your door it stands;
It is but a sprout, but it’s well budded out,
By the work of our Lord’s hands,’ &c.[558]
Another religious element, besides prayer, may have entered into the pre-Christian festival songs; and that is myth. A stage in the evolution of drama from the Dionysiac dithyramb was the introduction of mythical narratives about the wanderings and victories of the god, to be chanted or recited by the choragus. The relation of the choragus to the chorus bears a close analogy to that between the leader of the mediaeval carole and his companions who sang the refrain. This leader probably represents the Keltic or Teutonic priest at the head of his band of worshippers; and one may suspect that in the north and west of Europe, as in Greece, the pauses of the festival dance provided the occasion on which the earliest strata of stories about the gods, the hieratic as distinguished from the literary myths, took shape. If so the development of divine myth was very closely parallel to that of heroic myth[559].
After religion, the commonest motif of dance and song at the village festivals must have been love. This is quite in keeping with the amorous licence which was one of their characteristics. The goddess of the fertility of earth was also the goddess of the fertility of women. The ecclesiastical prohibitions lay particular stress upon the orationes amatoriae and the cantica turpia et luxuriosa which the women sang at the church doors, and only as love-songs can be interpreted the winileodi forbidden to the inmates of convents by a capitulary of 789[560]. The love-interest continues to be prominent in the folk-song, or the minstrel song still in close relation to folk-song, of mediaeval and modern France. The beautiful wooing chanson of Transformations, which savants have found it difficult to believe not to be a supercherie, is sung by harvesters and by lace-makers at the pillow[561]. That of Marion, an ironic expression of wifely submission, belongs to Shrove Tuesday[562]. These are modern, but the following, from the Chansonnier de St. Germain, may be a genuine mediaeval folk-song of Limousin provenance:
‘A l’entrada dal tems clar, eya,
Per joja recomençar, eya,
Et per jelos irritar, eya,