Anonymous (Serbian)

The Marko ballads are Serbian heroic songs, sung to the one-stringed gusle by anonymous singers from the fourteenth century down to the nineteenth. Their hero is Marko Kraljević (Prince Marko), son of King Vukašin, a vassal of the Turkish Sultan who in song becomes the champion of the Serbian people, a drinker, a fighter and a defender of the weak.

They are read here in the English version of D. H. Low, The Ballads of Marko Kraljević (Cambridge University Press, 1922), made chiefly from the collections of Vuk Karadžić and rendered in unrhymed lines that follow the long line of the originals. Low's introduction, notes and apparatus are left out; the thirty-one ballads, including the variants and one fragment, follow the order of the book. Added to them are the Kosovo songs, which centre on the Serbian defeat at Kosovo in 1389, in Helen Rootham's English version, Kossovo: Heroic Songs of the Serbs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1920), and a further selection of Kosovo, Marko and other heroic ballads in the rhymed version of George Rapall Noyes and Leonard Bacon, Heroic Ballads of Servia (Boston, 1913); the introductions and notes of those books are likewise left out.