BALLADS OF MAGIC
XIV
YOUNG SVEJDAL
A certain number of Ballads borrowed their subjects from the Old Norse Lays, making of them, not translations, but fresh creations; for the Lays tower above the many-coloured ballad-world like ice-peaks that loom over flowery meads. The story of Young Svejdal is derived from two Lays dealing with the adventures of Svipdag, who wakes Menglad from her trance on the magic mountain; but
“there is a vast difference between the simplicity of the Ballad and the stately measure and rhetorical pomp of the original:—
‘Svipdag is my name; Sunbright was my father’s name;
The winds have driven me far, along cold ways;
No one can gainsay the word of Fate,
Though it be spoken to his own destruction.’
“The difference is as great as the difference between the ballad of the ‘Marriage of Gawayne’ and the same story as told in the Canterbury Tales; or the difference between Homer’s way of describing the recovery of lifted cattle and the ballad of ‘Jannie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead’” (W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance, chap. ii., section 3).
This Ballad, indeed, brings down the story from the misty peaks of Valhalla into the garrulous region of fairy-tale. It is faithful to the primitive tradition which depicts the dead as waking unwillingly from their slumbers. Svejdal’s mother speaks as does the dead Vala in the nameless Lay called “Baldr’s Doom” by the editors of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale: