[165]. Düntzer, Zeitschr. deutsch. Gymnasialwesen, 1857, pp. I ff., the unwearied commentator, who has had so much experience in the practical reduction of poetry to prose, decided for this view, and doubtless with some show of right. A carmen, he said, was anything,—oath, formula, law, incantation,—spoken in loud and solemn tones. So Livy, I. 26, on that lex horrendi carminis. This may be true for the medicine man, but it is not true for the throng.
[166]. The λέξις ειρομένη and the λέξις κατασταμμένη; down to Herodotus the Greeks, it is said, spoke and wrote in the former style: Norden, I. 37, note. He appeals to specimens gathered from folklore.
[167]. Altgriechischer Versbau, p. 55.
[168]. “Musikalische Bildung der Meistersänger,” in Haupt’s Zeitsch. f. deutsches Alterthum, XX. 80 f.
[169]. The reason why a folksong often fails to have a musical effect, says Böckel in the introduction to his collection of Hessian ballads, p. civ., is because it is taken down from a single singer, whereas all these songs are essentially choral, and need the voices of a throng. This hint is valuable in many directions; for example, see below on social singing at labour.
[170]. Zeitschrift f. Völkerpsychol. u. Sprachwissensch. IV. 85 ff. Comparetti is also unfortunate in his use of this essay to prove that poetic prose came before verse. See his Kalewala, p. 37.
[171]. English Fairy Tales, 1898, p. 247. Ferdinand Wolf, a man not given to hazy and romantic views, dismisses the cante-fable as “jedesfalls ... eine Entartung,” a degenerate state of the communal ballad. Proben port. u. catal. Volksromanzen, Wien, 1856, p. 20, note 2.
[172]. Alfred Nutt, Voyage of Bran, I. 135, citing Kuno Meyer, and saying that certain prose is “younger in appearance,” need not assume it to have “suffered from change,” but may take a simpler view. The verse may well be of older date.
[173]. This account is taken from Bruchmann’s Poetik, p. 217, and Letourneau, L’Évolution Littéraire, pp. 198 f., who gives other details. J. F. Campbell, Popular Tales, etc., 2d ed., IV. 84, mentions cases of dual performance in the Highlands, where a bard sang to his harp heroic passages, and a narrator “filled up the pauses by telling prose history.”
[174]. Altgermanische Metrik, pp. 165, 168.