Modern Greek Folk-Songs of the Dead

Abstract

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.