free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Death of Pan
this has happened with an originally Greek ballad. In one case the
song has reached England, and in the other the belief embedded in
the song is found in England even if it did not come from Greece. The
Greek ballad of the Dead Brother who rises from the tomb to ride home
with his sister, is transformed into the Suffolk Miracle. And ‘The Bridge
of Arta’ embodies the same primitive and horrifying belief as a nursery
rhyme of ours, ‘London Bridge is Broken Down’. When the bridge falls
down, and wood and clay will wash away, and bricks and mortar will
not stay, and iron and steel will bend and bow, and silver and gold will
be stolen away, then
Set a man to watch all night,
Watch all night, watch all night
Set a man to watch all night,
My fair lady.
The Greek song ‘The Bridge of Arta’ illuminates this rhyme. In it the
master mason has to immure his own wife in the bridge he is building
in order to make it strong and firm. There is little doubt that the
‘guardian’ of London bridge is a victim. It is a belief common to Indo-
European folklore that bridges demand human sacrifice. The Bridge
Gate of Bremen, which was demolished in the last century, was found
to have the skeleton of a child embedded in the foundations.
Only a very few Greek songs had the mobility of ‘The Dead Brother’
and ‘The Bridge of Arta’. But within the Greek world almost all the
ballads circulated freely. Thus in a sense one is bound to talk about all
Greek folk poetry if one talks about a part – hence this general introduction.
Still, it can be kept short. For Crete was a creative centre in its
own right; and Cretan poetry can usually be distinguished from ballads
of alien origin which passed through Crete. In any case, the origin of a
song is only of academic interest. The important fact is that it is sung in
Crete; for songs and characters which came from Rhodes or Cyprus
or Asia Minor were usually adapted or domesticated by the Cretans.
Digenes Akritas himself, for example. The man who lurks behind
the legends, songs and epics of Digenes is a shadowy figure, very likely
never to be firmly identified. One suggestion is that he was the turmarch
Diogenes, ‘a competent officer’, who fell in 788 fighting the Arabs.
Whoever he was he has become one of the archetypal heroes of the
Greek nation. The poet Sepheris links him with Erotokritos and
Alexander the Great, and Grivas in Cyprus could think of no better
nom de guerre than Digenes. In the epic poem, Digenes is the son of an
Arabian Emir, Mousour, and a Greek girl, Eirene, the daughter of a
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