111. She died of grief for Hjalmar—
She the noble maid;
I swear an oath upon my honour
There lives none of whom the like can be said.
Refrain: Noble men are sailing now from Norway,
And a fair breeze bears them o'er the wave.
INTRODUCTION TO THE FAROESE RIDDLE BALLAD (GÁTU RÍMA)
The Gátu Ríma was first taken down in Suderø by a clergyman, Schröter, early in the nineteenth century, and is preserved in the archives of the Early Text Society in Copenhagen. Unfortunately Schröter was only able to obtain the Ballad in a fragmentary form, and he has left us only a Danish translation of what he found. In his travels on the Faroes in 1847-1848 Hammershaimb made strenuous efforts to get the entire version, but curiously enough only succeeded in getting a version (of course in the original Faroese) which corresponds closely in length and content with Schröter's. He published this version first in the Antiquarisk Tídsskrift, 1849-1851, and later Færöiske Kvæðer, vol. ii. (Copenhagen, 1855). The translation given below is taken from the ballad as printed in Færöiske Kvæðer.
That a longer version of this ballad once existed is proved by the fact that verse 8 of both Schröter's and Hammershaimb's versions states that Guest the Blind[1] propounds thirty riddles to King Heithrek—about the same number as are to be found in the Saga, though only some six riddles and the answers to four others have come down to us. Hammershaimb attributed the loss of the others to the fact that the ballad is no longer one of those used in the dance. He was of opinion that the riddles propounded in the Ríma are not the same as those found in the Saga; but it is to be noticed that the subjects of the riddles are in four cases the same, and in the other cases the subjects have the same characteristics, though the riddles themselves are not identical. It would therefore seem on the whole that the subjects of the Gátu Ríma were originally identical with those of the Saga, but that they have become corrupted and possibly confused in the popular mind.