No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Modern Greek Folk-Songs of the Dead
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
This paper is only a small scratch at the surface of a much larger investigation of the meanings of folk-song and folk-tale—and that is why this journey to the World of the Dead, as it appears in some Greek folk-songs, begins in a hesitating and roundabout manner. I had been reading Professor Dawkins's Forty-five Stories from the Dodekanese, and had been impressed by part of the Introduction in which he explains how ‘ideas and feelings about life’, which cannot be directly expressed and often remain unconscious or not consciously formulated, may be ‘conveyed in the concrete external shape of a story’, and after that I began to think that any work of art, ifit is good enough to survive at all, must express more than the maker's conscious beliefs and must include some serious statement about the nature of the world. All good folk-tales and all good folk-songs have a hidden meaning, and that is why they survive. In the brain of James Barrie some feeling about the nature of Time and History must have been germinating when he wrote in Peter Pan about the crocodile which swallowed the alarm-clock; and I wondered if he had ever heard the Chinese folk-tale about the dragon that swallowed the moon. From that my thoughts went to Alice in Wonderland, which tells us not only a great deal about the hidden temperament of Lewis Carroll but also something he had felt about life, and something more than he found satisfactorily expressed in his religion. If this feeling of his was of any importance, the view that it expressed, or the feeling that produced such a view, would be shared by others, and a similar expression of it would turn up somewhere else. That led to thoughts about the World under the Ground, the World Below, the Under World—ὁ κάτω κόσμος.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1955
References
1 Child, no. 37, p. 64.
2 Child, no. 39, p. 68.
3 Child, no. 19, p. 37.
4 Polites, no. 19, p. 37; Gneftos, p. 1.
5 Rose, H. J., Greek Mythology, p. 265.Google Scholar
6 Merlier, , Τραγούδια τῆς Ρούμεληξ (Athens, 1931), p. 67.Google Scholar
7 See, e.g., Hackforth, , ‘Immortality in Plato's Symposium’, CR LXIV, 1950, p. 43.Google Scholar
8 Greek Mythology, p. 90.
9 Folklore Society, 1908.
10 Polites, no. 92, p. 155; Passow, no. 517; and Gneftos, p. 99 (the only version which has the line about the horse falling in the mud).
11 Child, no. 272, p. 592.
12 Child, no. 74, p. 157; no. 77, p. 164.
13 Polites, no. 43, p. 49; Passow, nos. 104 and 134.
14 As often in Pontos in recent times. See Dawkins, , Folklore LIII (September 1942), p. 134.Google Scholar For such tombs cf. also Walton, J., ‘Hogback Tombstones and the Anglo-Danish House’ (dating from about A.D. 1000), Antiquity, June 1954.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 The Tempest, Cymbeline, Pericles, a Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Winter's Tale, as well as Romeo and Juliet, all seem to be presented in a Hellenistic world, no doubt owing to reflection from Italian sources of the post-classical Mediterranean romances.
16 Polites, no. 206, p. 240; from Chios.
17 Passow, no. 368, p. 263.
18 Jeannaraki, , Kretas Volkslieder (Leipzig, 1876), no. 145, p. 144.Google Scholar
19 Passow, no. 374, p. 265.
20 See Dante, , Inferno, xiv, 105 ff.Google Scholar; Dawkins, R. M., ‘Soul and Body in the Folklore of Modern Greece’ (Frazer Lecture), Folklore LIII (September 1942)Google Scholar; and Dawkins, R. M., Medium Aevum, II. 2 (June 1933).Google Scholar
21 See, for instance, version H. of the English ballad The Unquiet Grave quoted below (Child, no. 78, p. 167).
22 Passow, no. 371, p. 264.
23 Passow, no. 411, p. 292.
24 Polites, no. 222, p. 253; Passow, nos. 421–5.
26 Child, p. 104.
26 Child, p. 124, no. 63, B. version. There is another reference to ‘A pair of boots of cork’ in the folk-song The Keys of Canterbury: and in Greek there is another reference in Passow, no. 526, to ‘Golden corks on my feet’—which must refer to gilded heels; and see also one of the versions of Mary Hamilton—‘When she gaed up the Tolbooth stair The corks frae her heels did flee’ (Child, p. 664).
27 Polites, no. 221, p. 252; from the Peloponnese.
28 This version was given me by Mr. Donald Swann, who heard it sung by a twelve-year-old girl in Rhodes in 1946. See also Gneftos, P., Τραγούδια τῆς Ῥόδου (Alexandria, 1926), p. 93Google Scholar: Passow, no. 541 (first three lines only); and a long (seventeen lines) but inferior version with a different beginning in Fauriel, , Chants Populaires de la Grèce Moderne (Paris, 1825), vol. II, p. 401.Google Scholar
29 Child, no. 78, p. 167; versions A and H.
30 Rohde, E., Psyche, pp. 538, 539.Google Scholar
31 Folklore LIII (September 1942), p. 146.
32 Jung, C. G., Psychology and Alchemy, § 12Google Scholar (quoted in Fordham, , Introduction to Jung's Psychohgy, 1953Google Scholar).