With the coming in of the seventeenth-century Pastoral, the fashionable career of the Ballad was over, but its value was recognized from the literary and historical point of view; and the business of collection began in earnest. Royal patronage was not lacking. In June 1586 Queen Sophie visited Tycho Brahé in his observatory on the isle of Hveen, was storm-bound for three days, and entertained with Ballads by another guest, Anders Vedel the historian. He promised her a collection, which promise materialized in the shape of Queen Sophie’s Ballad Book, followed shortly by another based on the great folio MS. of the Odensee nunnery (Karen Brahé’s library).
The yeoman and peasant, meanwhile, remained faithful to the Ballad as a means of recreation, and continued to import new ones, mostly from Germany. Ballads were sung in Jutland until late in the nineteenth century, and many of these, not previously written down, were collected during the national revival of the eighteen-forties.
Danish Ballads were not only collected in MS., but printed and published earlier than those elsewhere—Vedel’s A Hundred Choice Danish Ballads in 1591; Tragica, or Love Ballads in 1657. Peter Syr’s enlarged collection followed in 1695. Danish Ballads from the Middle Ages was published in 1811-12 by Abrahamson, Nyerip, and Rahbek; and then came Sven Grundtvig’s epoch-making Denmark’s Ancient Ballads (1853), which contains every known version of every specimen, with critical and historical prefaces.
An excellent popular selection, by Axel Olrik and Ida Falbe Hansen (Danske Folkeviser i Udvalg), was published in 1912; and from the ballad-versions given therein I have prepared the translations which follow.
[1] With one exception—the ducal court at Gottorp in Sleswik; but its intellectual influence suffered from the constant warfare among the Holstein nobility.
HISTORICAL BALLADS
I, II
VALDEMAR AND TOVE (A) and (B)
The historical foundation for these two Ballads amounts only to this; that Valdemar I, or the Great (1157-82), had a mistress named Tove; that she bore him a son, Christopher; and that the King found it expedient to put her away, and ally himself with his opponent Knud Magnusson by marrying his half-sister Sophia. Nothing is known of Tove’s fate; her death at her rival’s hands is a figment of the popular fancy.