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miriiy poetry, mentioned in the preceding paragraph (00050), by disregarding the metric quantity belied its origin and asso ciated itself with the poetics of native Javan ese origin. Historically, among the various poetic forms of Javanese origin, the most impor tant seem to be the most simple and archaic ones, preserved in popular poetry and children’s ditties. The difference in form be tween these genres and regular Javanese poetry in so-called macapat or small metres lies in the freedom of increasing and di minishing the number of syllables in a line and the number of lines in a stanza, and also in the disregard of rhyme and allitera tion, though the latter elements of poetry are seldom absent altogether. Perhaps several texts nowadays known as children’s ditties are childish imitations or corrupt descendants of incantations, in olden times sung in shamanistic rites performed in religious ceremonies of pre-Hinduistic Javanese com munities (see 43750). Popular poetry resembling the well-known Malay pantun quatrains may have been cur rent in the North-East Coast districts of Java for a considerable time. In Javanese the quatrains were called parikans. Literary charades or enigmas, in Javanese called wav,salans, occupied an important place in popular poetry as well as in poems of a more sophisticated kind, even in religious mystic songs. Though the rather intricate structure of Javanese wav,salans seems artificial and affected, there is reason to believe in the great age of this kind of riddles and to con sider popular verse mainly founded on waqsalans as belonging originally to an

early period of the history of Javanese cul ture (see 31380). Popular poetry and children’s ditties were not written down before the nineteenth cen tury. Interested Dutch scholars prompted Javanese authors to collect them. The best collections have been made as late as the first half of the twentieth century, but even so the collected material is interesting and sufficient to show the variety of original Javanese poetical forms. In the Islamic period of Javanese cultural history authors of religious didactic poetry sometimes used metres not conforming to the rules of macapat prosody which were generally accepted at the time. In some cases the metres show a similarity with stanzas or quatrains found in Malay reli gious poetry (see 16000). A considerable part of Javanese Muslim religious texts was written by authors who were well acquainted with Malay literature. In other cases popular religious poetry might continue an auto chthonous tradition of simple octosyllabic- verse (cf. the above-mentioned Suluk Su- karsa). Factually in several metres belonging to the accepted macapat prosody, octosyllabic lines are dominating elements, and some me tres (kinanti, juru demur; and girisa) consist wholly of lines of eight syllables. They differ only in the number of octosyllabic lines in a stanza (six or eight) and by the variation of the rhyme. It is certain that in the Islamic period of Javanese literature and in Javanese-Balinese literature several prosodies existed side by side: the Old Javanese Indian metres (in Java still continued in kawi miriv, poetry), popular Javanese (and popular Balinese)