Language and Folklore. | 171 
or appealing reference’! (they also referred to this part as oga'”serta't 
‘the words appurtenant’). 
My texts hereafter mainly render the burdens of the songs. 
The refrain and the burden of the drumsongs make up a 
unit corresponding to what we understand by a strophe or stanza. 
The periods of the refrain are namely repeated almost unchanged 
‘ig. 24. Marhré. (W.T. phot. July 1906.) 
around each new burden. So many burdens, so many strophes. — 
Attiartertoq enumerated, counting on his fingers, the number of bur- 
dens in one of his drumsongs as seven; this song has consequently 
1 О. Fabricius (“Ordbog”, р. 458) has the same word from the westcoast, tainek 
(plural tärngit) ‘accusation, that which one mentions or says of another in a 
controversial song.’ P. Egede was probably not quite right when he renders 
this word (in the form ternga, which is 3. possessive of {ainek) as “the second 
song, the ballad itself” as opposed to “the prelude’, i. e. the introductory re- 
frain, for it only indicates part of the song “itself”, namely those separate lines 
of the poem that contain the burden. He states that the West Greenlanders called 
