London, 1920.
CONTENTS
| CHAP. | PAGE | |
| Introduction | [1] | |
| [HISTORICAL BALLADS] | ||
| I. | Valdemar and Tove (A) | [16] |
| II. | Valdemar and Tove (B) | [19] |
| III. | Queen Dagmar’s Bridal | [25] |
| IV. | Queen Dagmar’s Death | [28] |
| V. | Queen Bengerd | [32] |
| VI. | The King-slaying in Finderup | [38] |
| VII. | Marsk Stig and his Lady | [41] |
| VIII. | The Long Ballad of Marsk Stig (Extract) | [43] |
| IX. | Niels Ebbeson | [52] |
| [LEGENDARY BALLADS] | ||
| X. | Havbor and Signelil | [67] |
| XI. | Ebbe Skammelson | [77] |
| XII. | Oh, Seventy-seven Twice-told were They | [85] |
| XIII. | Holger Danske and Stout Didrik | [92] |
| [BALLADS OF MAGIC] | ||
| XIV. | Young Svejdal | [98] |
| XV. | Thord of Hafsgaard | [105] |
| XVI. | The Avenging Sword | [109] |
| XVII. | The Elfin Shaft | [116] |
| XVIII. | The Knavish Merman | [120] |
| XIX. | Agnes and the Merman | [123] |
| XX. | The Enchanted Maiden | [128] |
| [MISCELLANEOUS BALLADS] | ||
| XXI. | Torben’s Daughter | [133] |
| XXII. | The Maiden at the Thing | [135] |
| XXIII. | The Game of Dice | [139] |
| XXIV. | King Erik and the Scornful Maid | [143] |
| XXV. | The Maiden’s Morning Dream | [147] |
| XXVI. | Sir Karel’s Lyke-wake | [150] |
| XXVII. | Aage and Else | [154] |
| XXVIII. | Lovel and John | [159] |
| XXIX. | Tyge Hermandsson | [163] |
DANISH BALLADS
INTRODUCTION
It may be assumed that the student who approaches the Danish Ballads has already acquired some acquaintance with the prevailing theories as to the origin of Ballads in general. On that dark and debatable question I am unqualified to enter. To the earnest beginner I commend Dr. T. F. Henderson’s excellent Cambridge Manual The Ballad in Literature, where the opinions of Child, Gummere, Kittredge, and other authorities, are discussed with lucidity, learning, and common-sense. Suffice it here and now to say that those who push to extremes the theory of Communal Authorship must be capable of belief in that mythological personage who was born of nine mothers. While some Ballads (with their Incremental Repetition and so forth) were obviously created between leader and chorus in the Dance, others, no less obviously, were the work of individual poets. As the nineteenth century had its Walter Scott and its Hawker of Moorwinstow, so earlier ages had the anonymous minstrels who stamped the mark of original genius on “Niels Ebbeson” and “Sir Patrick Spens.”
“At the period when these songs were born, classes were mingled together, or rather did not as yet exist. The people was one; it was the élite, the best among them, who interpreted what all felt, but all could not express—who sang in the name of all. And thus it is that this poetry belongs to the populace as a whole.... It resembles a stone constantly rolled by the waves” (Pineau).
Child, moreover, points out that the British Ballad “was not originally the property of the common orders among the people”—and in Denmark, says Henderson, “it was fostered and favoured more particularly by the upper classes, and was for some centuries the chief medium of literary expression and culture.”