Note 417 — Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

It was noted that the Botocudos had no legends, no song of the past. A narrative song in the legendary sense is unknown to primitive folk; what they sing is the event of the day, an improvised song of sentences almost contemporary with the facts, cadenced by the communal dance. The sense of time past is so slender even among North American Indians (Powell, First Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology to Smithsonian Inst., 1881, pp. 29 ff.), that while they admit that grass grows, they “stoutly deny that the forest pines and the great sequoias were not created as they are.” Now this primitive trait of poetry is preserved in communal ballads; and from this strictly communal class, long historical ballads, like those in German collections, should be excluded. Kögel, Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur, I. 111, notes that “the epic song ... is one of the later kinds of poetry.... It cannot even be regarded as belonging to the common Germanic stock.” But the communal narrative song is another matter.