" While
this fate has not been granted the work, it has grown deservedly
popular. Philological criticism has caviled at the free hand which
Arnim, especially, used in remolding the songs, but the editors are
freed of any possible charge of intellectual dishonesty toward reader
and source in that their object was to present artistic unities and
not material for further study and dissection.
A folk-song is a song which has become a part of the lyric
consciousness of the people; often the singers do not know that
what they are singing has a literary origin--they have thoroughly
assimilated it. In the best sense of the term, the songs of _The Boy's
Magic Horn_ are folk-songs. They are both narrative and dramatic as
well as pure lyric in form, and are simple, powerful, and direct in
expression. They treat all phases of German life of the past, from a
crude version of the _Lay of Hildebrant_ to the riddles, lullabies,
and counting-out rhymes of children. Pictures of the moral and social
life of peasant Germany are followed by poems of nature and of the
supernatural. Tragedies vary with humorous skits, extravagant and
mocking, and the collection is enlivened with many flyting poems
about tailors--a favorite butt of the peasant past. Ballads of popular
origin and ballads with an added sentimental touch, such as the famous
Strassburg poem with the added Alpine horn motif, are found here.
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