The Popol Vuh: The Mythic and Heroic Sagas of the Kichés...

There is not wanting evidence to show that, like most barbarous compositions which depended for their popularity upon the ease with which they could be memorised, the “Popol Vuh” was originally composed in metre. Passages here and there show a decided metrical tendency, as:

The first line almost scans in iambics (English style), and the fifth is perfect, except for the truncation in the fourth foot. The others appear to us to consist of that alternation of sustained feet—musically represented by a semibreve—with pyrrhics, which is characteristic of nearly all savage dance-poetry. Father Coto, a missionary, observes that the natives were fond of telling long stories and of repeating chants, keeping time to them in those dances of which all the American aboriginal peoples appear to have been so fond—and still are, as Baron Nordenskjöld has recently discovered in the Aymara country. These chants were called nugum tzih, or “garlands of words,” and although the native compiler of the “Popol Vuh” appears to have been unable to recollect the precise rhythm of the whole, many passages attest its original odic character.