[419]. See Böckel, work quoted, cxix.
[420]. Steenstrup has some good remarks on this point, work quoted, pp. 188 ff., 203 ff.
[421]. Of far earlier date than ballads, this poetry is in a later stage of evolution. Wîdsið, the oldest recorded English poem, shows more art and more poetic dialect than many a bit of Scottish verse picked up a century ago.
[422]. See R. Heinzel, Ueber den Stil der altgermanischen Poesie, Strassburg, 1875; W. Bode, Die Kenningar in der angelsächsischen Dichtung, Darmstadt u. Leipzig, 1886; R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Poesie. See too Uhland, Klein. Schrift., I. 390.
[423]. A kenning, with many branches in Anglo-Saxon poetry, calls survivors of battle “the leavings of weapons.” This may once have been literal; but in its context it looks as deliberate as Lamb’s phrase for a resuscitated victim of the gallows,—“refuse of the rope, the leavings of the cord” (Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged).
[424]. Pop. Tales, IV. 152.
[425]. The general testimony for all ballads. For example, Fauriel, Chants Populaires de la Grèce Moderne, I. cxxix; these, he says, are full of commonplaces and recurrent phrases; the diction is “simple, nervous, and direct, that is, it has few figures, almost no inversions, and progresses in short periodic and nearly equal passages.” Remains of oldest Greek folk song show the same traits: Usener, Altgriech. Versbau, p. 45.
[426]. Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Lachmann, p. 4.
Sîne klâwen
durh die wolken sint geslagen,