There is a tendency, among admirers of folk poetry, to equate the ‘folk’ or ‘true folk’ with what is ‘good’. As a result, understandably little attention is paid to types of folk poetry which from an aesthetic point of view are more often mediocre or bad. One may chuckle at the lack of dexterity shown by the English broadside balladist in the lines,

or at the incongruity of the Cypriot farmer, who on his own admission could neither read nor write, including in a song of Diyenis the line,

It's written in our books, it's not a folk tale

These absurdities, together with an irritating exactitude about dates and a tendency to moralise, are found in certain Greek songs, as in British broadside ballads, and a number of prominent scholars, such as Francis Child for the British and Stilpon Kyriakidis for the Greek, have in effect refused these songs recognition as part of the folk traditions in which they are found (Child, letter to Grundtvig, in Hustvedt, 1930, p. 254; Kyriakidis, 1965, pp. 107–11). But the mere existence (and persistence) of these incongruous and irritating tendencies in such a wealth of material as the British broadside and the Greek rímes, as they are sometimes called, deserves attention.