makers fastened, have a unity or
connection with each other which hints at a complete story. The
ballads which deal with Robin Hood are so numerous and so closely
related that they constantly suggest, not only the possibility, but
the probability of epic treatment. It is surprising that the richness
of the material, and its notable illustrative quality, did not
inspire some earlier Chaucer to combine the incidents in a sustained
narrative. But the epic poet did not appear, and the most
representative of English popular heroes remains the central figure
in a series of detached episodes and adventures, preserved in a long
line of disconnected ballads.

This apparent arrest, in the ballad stage, of a story which seemed
destined to become an epic, naturally suggests the vexed question of
the author ship of the popular ballads. They are in a very real sense
the songs of the people; they make no claim to individual authorship;
on the contrary, the inference of what may be called community
authorship is, in many instances, irresistible. They are the product
of a social condition which, so to speak, holds song of this kind in
solution; of an age in which improvisation, singing, and dancing are
the most natural and familiar forms of expression. They deal almost
without exception with matters which belong to the community memory
or imagination; they constantly reappear with variations so
noticeable as to indicate free and common handling of themes of wide
local interest. All this is true of the popular ballad; but all this
does not decisively settle the question of authorship. What share did
the community have in the making of these songs, and what share fell
to individual singers?

Herder, whose conception of the origin and function of literature
was so vitalizing in the general aridity of thinking about the
middle of the last century, and who did even more for ballad verse
in Germany than Bishop Percy did in England, laid emphasis almost
exclusively on community authorship. His profound instinct for
reality in all forms of art, his deep feeling for life, and the
immense importance he attached to spontaneity and unconsciousness in
the truest productivity made community authorship not only
attractive but inevitable to him. In his pronounced reaction
against the superficial ideas of literature so widely held in the
Germany of his time, he espoused the conception of community
authorship as the only possible explanation