[511]. 1117 f. It has been noted that Kögel, Gesch. d. d. Lit., I. 54, says, without good reason, that this was a magic song, a spruch. It was surely what it is called, a song of lament, a vocero, and doubtless asked the same old question.
[512]. St. Augustine tells how such songs were sung at the tomb of St. Cyprian: “per totam noctem cantabantur hic nefaria, et cantantibus saltabatur.” See also the well-known passage from Burchard of Worms: “cantasti ibi diabolica carmina et fecisti ibi saltationes”—i.e. at the “vigiliis cadaverum mortuorum.” Müllenhoff, work quoted, pp. 26 ff., gives some of these protests of the church. On p. 30 he notes that the songs themselves were improvised: extempore et subito facta. The older the rite, the more choral and communal it grows. The names (ibid., p. 25) are significant: dâdsisas, leidsang, chlagasang, etc., for older German; lîcsang, lîcleóð (epicedium), byrgensang (epitaphium), etc., for older English.
[513]. Béow., 1322, 2124 f.
[514]. Ibid., 2446 f., 2460. There is a sort of vocero echo here. Remarkable, too, in the story of the self-buried chief, is a vocero of that old man over himself, the last of the race burying his treasure as a kind of substitute: ibid., 2233 ff. It is superfluous to point out how English lyric poetry, from the Ruin to the Elegy, and on to our own day, loves to linger by a grave. Traces of the vocero that led to the vendetta might be found in the countless stories of old Germanic feud.
[515]. De Orig. Act. Getarum, ed. Holder, c. 49. A similar story is told (c. 41) of the funeral of King Theoderid of the Visigoths, killed in 451, and of the wild songs that were sung even on the field of battle as the warriors bore away the body of their king.
[516]. Child, I. 182.
[517]. Folk-Lore Soc. Pub., IV. (1881), pp. 21, 31.
[518]. Scott, Minstrelsy, 1812, II. 361 ff.
[519]. Still found in remote places,—among Germans in North Hungary, and in Gottschee in Krain, speech-islands both. Meyer, Volkskunde, p. 272.
[520]. “Dans der Maegdekens,” heard at Bailleul by Coussemaker. See his Chants Populaires des Flamands de France, Gand, 1856, pp. 100 f. Soon after 1840 it was forbidden, and the song is no more, save in the record. It goes back, says C., to the oldest times.