Language and Folklore. 175: 
The burden. — The prosody of the burden-lines deserves a special 
mention apart from that of the refrains. Besides I here come to the 
poems that have no refrains. 
In the burden of the poem the artistic task presents itself of 
moulding the language, for though flexible it is limited to the forms 
prescribed by grammar, whereas the senseless words of the refrain 
— in contrast to those of the burden — are unhampered by grammato- 
logical considerations and much more easily brought under the yoke 
of rhythm. 
The artistic means are partly of this rhythmical nature, partly 
assonances and rhymes (the latter, though, rather rare). 
There are of course no elaborated, inherited metrics in this 
language as in the classical languages of literature; we cannot refer 
the Eskimo verse to any metrum Aristophanicum, Sapphicum or 
Glyconicum etc. But nevertheless, the innate rhythmics of the Eskimo 
words also tend to produce typical metric “cadences” (to use the 
word of an old Danish-Greenland author ') characteristic of the poems 
of this tongue. The basis of this development is no doubt the rules 
for the quantity of the sounds and syllables which we have already 
ascertained in the Greenland grammar ($ 31 cf. Phon. Study $$ 20—22). 
The rhythmical moulding is materialized and carried further by 
means of the polysynthetic power of this language, which shows such 
a considerable width of variations as regards its rhythmic formations. 
In the words and the sentences iambi, trochees, dactyls, spondees 
and anapests vary in an inexhaustible stream. The poets have a 
splendid material in this language transmitted as it was and is — 
and as we find it in these primitive texts from East Greenland where 
something approaching to definite rhythmic types, if not regular metra 
seem to have been evolving. It looks as if the poets had been seized 
by a common suggestion making them equally fond of certain metrical 
effects. Beside the more modern drumsongs there are certain ancient 
poems in whose rhythms we seem to hear the sounds of discarded 
measures. In the living language the dynamic accent at all times 
acts as a recreating principle; the quantitative mass of the sounds. 
is inert and conservative, but the dynamics of the accents stamped 
with the temperament of the speakers sway the heavy masses as the 
wind sways the waves of the sea, causing not only new formations 
in the history of the language, but also constantly shifting the pro- 
nunciation of the words, not the least in the accentuation of the long 
words. The poets, in Greenland also, reckon with such shiftings, 
and make use of these poetical licenses. The reciters, too, are aware 
of this. 
1 Hans Egede, Perlustration (1729) pag. 86. 
