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Ballads of Wandering and Captivity
The ballads of wandering (bujdosó ballada) and captivity (rabballada), which can be dated to the 17th and 18th centuries, represent a separate group. This delimitation of time cannot be taken rigidly; rather it indicates a period of development, the rise of characteristic features, since frequently a phrase, a strophe, or an entire connected section of such ballads of wandering and captivity went into the songs of the period that followed the defeat of the wars of liberation. Other parts have been integrated into the 19th century ballads of outlaws (betyár ballada). The fate of the Hungarians fighting for their national freedom during the devastating Turkish occupation appears in these balladic laments with the validity of true poetry. This is no longer the world of the ballads of romance conjuring up royal, lordly courts. Neither is the cocky good spirit present, the resolute firmness of the Kossuth songs and soldiers’ songs of 1848. The themes are of ravaged, smoking peasant {533.} villages, deserted manors, the desperation of lost battles, the entreaty of captives to the miserly families, the lover waiting in vain, the soldier wandering in the pathless winter forest. Songs of particular authors might be supposed among these songs, laments of students and wandering soldiers, epic songs striking the chord of older ballads. However, their unity has absolute validity and clearly shows what differentiates poetic inspiration from recreations by the people, from continual polishing, and the monumental power of oral tradition. These songs and fragments give us a lyric, poignant portrait of the period through the eyes of the serfs. Let us mention here also that these were the centuries in which a characteristic stratum of the so-called “Turkish” soldier songs developed, the Hajdú and wandering songs of Rumanian, Bulgarian, Albanian and South Slav folk poetry. Comparative examination of these songs (one part of the Ukrainian folk poetry can also be included here) is one of the many tasks Eastern European folklore studies have still ahead. While the epic character defines the method of performance of the ballads in the first group–even of those constructed through dramatic dialogues–this group of ballads is characterized by lyric presentation.
The next group of ballads is defined by their dramatic construction and mode of depiction. These are characteristically composed so as to condense the story into one or more powerful dramatic scenes, and if there are more scenes, each is an almost independent dramatic whole, filled, in spite of the small scope, with terrific tension, with the clashing of emotions and passions. The historical dimensions of these ballads may be placed at about the periphery of the 17th and 18th centuries, although there are some, stylistically not part of the old ballad style, such as the ballad of László Fehér, which uses motifs that go back at least to the 16th century, and at the same time several elements foreshadowing the outlaw ballads:
This ballad is known throughout the entire Hungarian linguistic region, and new variations of it are still being discovered. Its archaic characteristics point to medieval origin; its main theme is widespread over Western Europe, so that it was even written up in literature, for example in Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” or Sardou–Puccini’s “Tosca”. The subject, is probably Italian in origin, and passed on into French and English collections of tales through Latin transmission. This ballad {537.} probably came to Hungary from the Italians, perhaps through Dalmatian transmission, after the middle of the 16th century.
This group contains whole strings of beautiful ballads, among them the ballads about the great mountain robbers, Ilona Budai, Beautiful Anna Bíró, Boldizsár Bátori, Anna Bethlen, and also the ballad of the girl who was danced to death (cf. Plate XXVIII).
In these epic songs of dramatic force, the merciless, closed system of feudalism is manifested much more than before; and, contrary to the conclusions of earlier researchers, it can be ascertained that the cause of these dramatic clashes is precisely the social and family order that suppressed individual feeling and proved how much the individual was at the mercy of the blind and wild forces of society. All conflicts arise from this. Passions, too, all run in the same closed electric circuit; hatred, jealousy, greed, violation and murder fill the stones. Not a word is mentioned about the tragedies of Christian freedom of choice; rather it keeps coming to light that it is impossible to break out of this predetermined closed system. The power of these ballads to describe human beings, their method of shaping human fates through certain passions, is unmatched in its kind. The story begins immediately with an explosive, tense scene, and one of the great marvels of these ballads is precisely that the very few scenes and characters provide the tragic tension of great drama. The apparent great difference between epic and ballad can be found, among other things, in this method of construction, in such a dramatic and concise method of composing the story of the ballad. It is also characteristic that, while in the dramatic ballads of the 16th and 18th centuries the peasants already appear with their own social clashes among the characters, and while in the folk tale and historic ballads they almost never appear, or infrequently as secondary characters, the situation is reversed in dance ballads, where, with the exception of the ballad about the prince, the characters come exclusively from peasant class society.
| Ballads of Romance and of the Turkish Period | CONTENTS | Dance Ballads |