calculated to keep awake the feasted
nobles who listened to the song. In an age when writing, if it exists at
all, is a rare and secret art, the mists of antiquity descend after a
very few generations. There is little chance of the songs of the bards
being checked by recorded actuality; for if anyone could write at all,
it would be the bards themselves, who would use the mystery or purposes
of their own trade. In quite a short time, oral tradition, in keeping of
the bards, whose business is to purvey wonders, makes the champions
perform easily, deeds which "the men of the present time" can only gape
at; and every bard takes over the stock of tradition, not from original
sources, but from the mingled fantasy and memory of the bard who came
just before him. So that when this tradition survives at all, it
survives in a form very different from what it was in the beginning. But
apparently we can mark out several stages in the fortunes of the
tradition. It is first of all court poetry, or perhaps baronial poetry;
and it may survive as that. From this stage it may pass into possession
of the common people, or at least into the possession of bards whose
clients are peasants and not nobles; from being court poetry it becomes
the poetry of cottages and taverns. It may survive as this. Finally, it
may be taken up again by the courts, and become poetry of much greater
sophistication and nicety than it was in either of the preceding stages.
But each stage leaves its sign on the tradition.

All this gives us what is conveniently called "epic material"; the
material out of which epic poetry might be made. But it does not give us
epic poetry. The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered
up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as
extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always. Instances
are our own Border Ballads and Robin Hood Ballads; the Servian cycles of
the Battle of Kossovo and the prowess of Marko; the modern Greek songs
of the revolt against Turkey (the conditions of which seem to have been
similar to those which surrounded the growth of our riding ballads); the
fragments of Finnish legend which were pieced together into the
_Kalevala_; the Ossianic poetry; and perhaps some of the minor sagas
should be put in here. Then there are the glorious Welsh stories of
Arthur, Tristram, and the rest, and the not less glorious Irish stories
of Deirdre and Cuchulain; both of these noble masses of