Note 369 — Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

This traditional, narrative song is called ballad throughout the present book,—unfortunately an equivocal term. The terminology of the whole subject is notoriously bad, and “ballad” is no exception to the rule. See Old English Ballads, pp. xviii ff.; Blankenburg, Litterarische Zusätze u. s. w., I. 387 ff., under “Dichtkunst”; for modern “ballad,” Werner in the Anzeiger für deutsches Alterthum, XIV. 165 ff., 190 f., XV. 259; for German names, Erich Schmidt, Charakteristiken, pp. 199 ff.; on balada, Jeanroy, Origines, etc., p. 403, who shows the passage of the word from its meaning as a dance-song to the technical term for a fixed form of verse. In Corsica a ballata can be a lament (see below under vocero), and derives from the dance round a corpse: J. B. Marcaggi, Les Chants de la Mort, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 121, note on the caracolu, “a sort of pantomime danced about the corpse by the mourning women, with gestures of grief,” but now fallen out of use. Of course, the only point here is to separate the ballad from songs like Greensleeves, from journalism (for the so-called “ballad” under Elizabeth shows that her folk were as anxious to get into print, or to keep out of it, as we are in days of the newspaper), from occasional poetry, scurrilous rimes, hymns, and all the rest. “Sonnet” was a word that then not only meant any short poem, but occasionally made a little competition with “ballad”; several of the ballads in the Rawlinson Collection, Bodleian Library, are called “sonnet” either by title or in the text.