Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians Part 5

The disasters which Serbian peasants most fear are of two kinds--drought and very violent storms. In pagan times there was a G.o.ddess who, it is believed, ruled the waters and the rain. When the Serbians were first converted to Christianity, the power of controlling the ocean, rivers, and storms, and the sailing of s.h.i.+ps at sea, was attributed to St. Nicholas, and the Dalmatians, sea-going men, still pray only to him; whereas in the heart of Serbia, where the peasants have no conception of what large navigable rivers are, still less of what seas and lakes are like, recourse is taken to the favourite G.o.ddess Doda or Dodola whenever there is an unduly long spell of dry weather.

The Dodola rite is a peculiar one. A maiden, generally a Gipsy, is divested of her usual garments and then thickly wrapped round with gra.s.s and flowers so that she is almost concealed beneath them. She wears a wide wreath of willow branches interwoven with wild flowers around her waist and hips, and in such fantastic attire she has to go from house to house in the village dancing, while each housewife pours over her a pailful of water, and her companions chant a prayer having the refrain, Oy Dodo, oy Dodole, after every single line:

Fall, O rain! and gentlest dew!

Oy, Dodo! Oy, Dodole!

Refresh our pasture-lands and fields!

Oy, Dodo! Oy, Dodole!

In each verse that follows mention is made of a cereal or other plant, imploring Doda that rain may soon be shed upon it. Then the cottage women give them presents, either food or money, and the maidens sing other songs for them, always in the same rhythm, give their thanks, offer good wishes, and are gone.

Whitsuntide

During the Whitsuntide festivities, about fifteen young girls, mostly Christian Gipsies, one of whom personates the Standard-bearer, another the King, and another the Queen (kralyitza), veiled and attended by a number of Maids of Honour, pa.s.s from door to door through the village, singing and dancing. Their songs relate to such subjects as marriage, the choice of a husband or wife, the happiness of wedded life, the blessing of having children. After each verse of their songs follows a refrain, Lado, oy, Lado-leh! which is probably the name of the ancient Slavonic Deity of Love.

Palm Sunday

"In winter, just before Lent, the great festival in honour of the Dead is celebrated, at which every one solemnizes the memory of departed relations and friends, and no sooner does Palm Sunday arrive than the people join in commemorating the renovation of life.

"On the preceding Sat.u.r.day the maidens a.s.semble on a hill, and recite poems on the resurrection of Lazarus; and on Sunday, before sunrise, they meet at the place where they draw water and dance their country dance (kolllo), chanting a song, which relates how the water becomes dull by the antlers of a stag, and bright by his eye." [23]

St. George's Day

On St. George's Day, April 23rd (Dyourdyev Dan), long before dawn, all the members of a Serbian family rise and take a bath in the water, in which a number of herbs and flowers--each possessing its own peculiar signification--have been cast before sunset the preceding day. He who fails to get up in good time, and whom the sun surprises in bed, is said to have fallen in disgrace with St. George, and he will consequently have little or no luck in any of his undertakings for the next twelve months. This rite is taken as a sign that the Serbian peasants yield to the many influences of newly awakened nature.

It will be seen by anyone who studies the matter that each season in turn prompts the Serbians, as it must prompt any simple primitive people, to observe rites pointing to the mysterious relation in which man finds that he stands to nature.

CHAPTER III: SERBIAN NATIONAL EPIC POETRY

The Importance of the Ballads

That the Serbian people--as a distinct Slav and Christian nationality--did not succ.u.mb altogether to the Ottoman oppressor; that through nearly five centuries of subjection to the Turk the Southern Slavs retained a deep consciousness of their national ideals, is due in a very large measure to the Serbian national poetry, which has kept alive in the hearts of the Balkan Christians deep hatred of the Turk, and has given birth, among the oppressed Slavs, to the sentiment of a common misfortune and led to the possibility of a collective effort which issued in the defeat of the Turk on the battlefields of Koumanovo, Monastir, Prilip, Prizrend, Kirk-Kilisse, and Scutari.

Who has written those poems? We might as well ask, who is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey? If Homer be the collective pseudonym of an entire cycle of h.e.l.lenic national bards, 'The Serbian people'

is that of the national bards who chanted those Serbian epic poems during the centuries, and to whom it was nothing that their names should be attached to them. The task of the learned Diascevastes of Pisistrate's epoch, which they performed with such ability in the old h.e.l.lade, has been done in Serbia by a self-taught peasant, the famous Vouk Stephanovitch-Karadgitch, in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Vouk's first collection of Serbian national poems, which he wrote down as he heard them from the lips of the gousslari (i.e. Serbian national bards), was published for the first time at Vienna in 1814, and was not only eagerly read throughout Serbia and in the literary circles of Austria and Germany, but also in other parts of Europe. Goethe himself translated one of the ballads, and his example was quickly followed by others.

Those poems--as may be seen from the examples given in this volume--dwell upon the glory of the Serbian mediaeval empire, lost on the fatal field of Kossovo (1389). When the Turks conquered the Serbian lands and drove away the flower of the Serbian aristocracy, these men took refuge in the monasteries and villages, where the Turkish hors.e.m.e.n never came. There they remained through centuries undisturbed, inspired by the eloquence of the Serbian monks, who considered it their sacred duty to preserve for the nation behind their old walls the memory of ancient kings and tzars and of the glorious past in which they flourished.

Professional bards went from one village to another, chanting in an easy decasyllabic verse the exploits of Serbian heroes and Hadooks (knight-brigands), who were the only check upon the Turkish atrocities. The bards carried news of political and other interesting events, often correct, sometimes more or less distorted, and the gifted Serbians--for gifted they were and still are--did not find it difficult to remember, and to repeat to others, the stories thus brought to them in poetic form. As the rhythm of the poems is easy, and as the national ballads have become interwoven with the spirit of every true Serbian, it is not rare that a peasant who has heard a poem but once can not only repeat it as he heard it, but also improvise pa.s.sages; nay, he can at times even compose entire original ballads on the spur of inspirational moments.

In Serbian Hungary there are schools in which the blind learn these national ballads, and go from one fair to another to recite them before the peasants who come from all Serbian lands. But this is not the true method. In the mountains of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina there is no occasion to learn them mechanically: they are familiar to all from infancy. When, in the winter evening, the members of a Serbian family a.s.semble around the fire, and the women are engaged with their spinning, poems are recited by those who happen to know them best.

The Goussle

The ballads are recited invariably to the accompaniment of a primitive instrument with a single string, called a goussle, which is to be met with in almost every house. The popular Serbian poet, Peter Petrovitch, in his masterpiece, Gorsky Viyenatz ('The Mountain Wreath') uttered the following lines, which have become proverbial:

Dye se goussle u kutyi ne tchuyu Tu su mrtva i kutya i lyoudi.

(The house in which the goussle is not heard Is dead, as well as the people in it.)

The old men, with grown-up sons, who are excused from hard labour, recite to their grandchildren, who yield themselves with delight to the rhythmic verse through which they receive their first knowledge of the past. Even the abbots of the monasteries do not deem it derogatory to recite those ballads and to accompany their voices by the monotonous notes of the goussle. But the performance has more of the character of a recitation than of singing: the string is struck only at the end of each verse. In some parts of Serbia, however, each syllable is accentuated by a stroke of the bow, and the final syllable is somewhat prolonged.

The heroic decasyllabic lines have invariably five trochees, with the fixed caesura after the second foot; and almost every line is in itself a complete sentence.

There is hardly a tavern or inn in any Serbian village where one could see an a.s.sembly of peasants without a gousslar, around whom all are gathered, listening with delight to his recitals. At the festivals near the cloisters, where the peasants meet together in great numbers, professional gousslars recite the heroic songs and emphasize the pathetic pa.s.sages in such an expressive manner that there is hardly a listener whose cheeks are not bedewed with copious tears. The music is extremely simple, but its simplicity is a powerful and majestic contrast to the exuberance of romance manifested in the exploits and deeds of some favourite hero--as, for example, the Royal Prince Marko.

There are many bold hyperboles in those national songs, and little wonder if they are discredited by Western critics, especially in the ballads concerning the exploits of the beloved Marko--who "throws his heavy mace aloft as high as the clouds and catches it again in his right hand, without dismounting from his trusty courser Sharatz." Now and then an English reader may find pa.s.sages which may seem somewhat coa.r.s.e, but he must bear in mind that the ballads have usually been composed and transmitted from generation to generation by simple and illiterate peasants. Most of those concerning the Royal Prince Marko date from the early fourteenth century, when the customs, even in Western Europe, were different from those prevailing now. My translations have, however, been carefully revised by Mrs. C. H. Farnam, who has taken a great interest in this book, and has endeavoured to do no injustice to the rugged originals. Having pa.s.sed some time in Serbia--as many n.o.ble English ladies have done--nursing the wounded heroes of the Balkan War, of 1912-13, and softening their pain with unspeakable tenderness and devotion, she was attracted by the natural, innate sense of honesty and the bravery which her cultivated mind discovered in those simple Serbians and her interest has since extended to their history and literature.

It is worthy of consideration that the history of the Serbian and other Southern Slavonic nations, developed by its poetry--if not even replaced by it altogether--has through it been converted into a national property, and is thus preserved in the memory of the entire people so vividly that a Western traveller must be surprised when he hears even the most ignorant Serbian peasant relate to him something at least of the old kings and tsars of the glorious dynasty of Nemagnitch, and of the feats and deeds of national heroes of all epochs.

CHAPTER IV: KRALYEVITCH MARKO; OR, THE ROYAL PRINCE MARKO

The Marko Legends

Marko was, as we have already seen, the son of King Voukas.h.i.+n; and his mother was Queen Helen, whom the Serbian troubadours called by the pleasing and poetic name Yevrossima (Euphrosyne) in their songs and poems.

According to the popular tradition, the Prince was born in the castle of Skadar (Scutari), and his mother, being the sister of that most glorious and adventurous knight Momchilo, fortunately transmitted much of the heroism, and many of the other virtues, characteristic of her own family, to her son.

But there is also another tradition, equally popular, which maintains that Marko was the child of a veela (fairy-queen) and a zmay (dragon). The fact that his father was a dragon is believed, by those who accept this tradition, to explain and in every way to account for, Marko's tremendous strength and his astonis.h.i.+ng powers of endurance.