Instances perpetually occur in the Sagas: Grettir, Egil,
Skarphedin, are always singing. In Kidnapped, Mr. Stevenson
introduces "The Song of the Sword of Alan," a fine example of
Celtic practice: words and air are beaten out together, in the
heat of victory. In the same way, the women sang improvised
dirges, like Helen; lullabies, like the lullaby of Danae in
Simonides, and flower songs, as in modern Italy. Every function of
life, war, agriculture, the chase, had its appropriate magical and
mimetic dance and song, as in Finland, among Red Indians, and among
Australian blacks. "The deeds of men" were chanted by heroes, as
by Achilles; stories were told in alternate verse and prose; girls,
like Homer's Nausicaa, accompanied dance and ball play, priests and
medicine-men accompanied rites and magical ceremonies by songs.

These practices are world-wide, and world-old. The thoroughly
popular songs, thus evolved, became the rude material of a
professional class of minstrels, when these arose, as in the heroic
age of Greece. A minstrel might be attached to a Court, or a
noble; or he might go wandering with song and harp among the
people. In either case, this class of men developed more regular
and ample measures. They evolved the hexameter; the laisse of the
Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian
poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The
narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the
mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed
into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many
cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in
professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and
jongleurs (who may best be studied in Leon Gautier's Introduction
to his Epopees Francaises) sang in Court and Camp. The poorer,