Book Description

The ballads of Servia occupy a high position, perhaps the highest position, in the ballad literature of Europe. Of them Jacob Grimm wrote: “They would, if well known, astonish Europe,” and “in them breathes a clear and inborn poetry such as can scarcely be found among any other modern people.”1 The origin of this popular literature goes back to a period of which no written record exists; its known history dates from the fourteenth century, since which time it is absolutely continuous. And in Servia, unlike England and Spain, ballads still survive as an important part of the nation’s intellectual life; they are still sung, and still composed, by peasant poets who have received their training from oral tradition instead of from the printed page. According to their subjects the Servian ballads may be divided into two very unequal divisions, the first, and by far the larger, being based on the national history, while the second lacks any such historical foundation. Yet the line between the two groups cannot be strictly drawn; well-known folk-lore motives or mere popular jests are continually attached to historical heroes. Such ballads as Prince Marko’s Plowing and Marko Drinks Wine in Ramazán called “historical” only in the most ultra-catholic interpretation of the term. The historical ballads may again be divided into more or less definite cycles. First in order of time come those dealing with the kings of the Némanich dynasty (1168-1367). This royal line made less impression on the popular mind by its heroic exploits than by its piety in founding churches and monasteries (cf. p. 28). The surviving ballads of the cycle, which are few in number, are represented in this volume by Urosh and the Sons of Marnyáva1 and The Building of Skadar. After the death of the great tsar Stepan Dushan in 1356, his son, the weak Urosh, came to the throne, but was unable to preserve his authority intact. The leader of the revolting chieftains was King Vukáshin, who defeated his lawful superior and caused him to be slain. Of the rivalry of the two men the ballad Urosh and the Sons of Marnyáva preserves a distant echo; to the historic brothers Vukáshin and Úglyesha it adds a third, Goyko, unknown outside of folk-lore. Another glimpse, still more legendary, of the three brothers is preserved in The Building of Skadar.