No complete ballad of the Ribold class is known to have survived in German, but a few verses have been interpolated by tradition in the earliest copy of the Ulinger ballad (vv. 47-56), which may almost with certainty be assigned to one of the other description. They disturb the narrative where they are, and a ready occasion for their slipping in was afforded by the scene being exactly the same in both ballads: a knight and a lady, with whom he had eloped, resting in a wood.[111] See No 4, p. 32 of this volume.
We find in a pretty Neapolitan-Albanian ballad, which, with others, is regarded by the editors as a fragment of a connected poem, several of the features of these northern ones. A youth asks a damsel in marriage, but is not favored by her mother, father, or brother. He wins over first the mother and then the father by handsome presents, but his gifts, though accepted, do not conciliate the brother. He carries off the lady on horseback, and is attacked by the brother, four uncles, and seven cousins. He is killed and falls from his horse; with him the lady falls dead also, and both are covered up with stones. In the spring the youth comes up a cypress, the damsel comes up a vine, and encloses the cypress in her arms. (Rapsodie d'un poema albanese raccolte nelle colonie del Napoletano, de Rada and de' Coronei, Florence, 1866, lib. ii., canto viii.)
These ballads would seem to belong among the numerous ramifications of the Hilde saga. Of these, the second lay of Helgi Hundingslayer, in Sæmund's Edda, and 'Waltharius,' the beautiful poem of Ekkehard, are most like the ballads.[112] Leaving 'Waltharius' till we come to 'Erlinton,' we may notice that Sigrún, in the Helgi lay, though promised by her father to another man, Hödbrodd, son of Granmar, preferred Helgi. She sought him out, and told him frankly her predicament: she feared, she said, the wrath of her friends, for breaking her father's promise. Helgi accepted her affection, and bade her not care for the displeasure of her relatives. A great battle ensued between Helgi and the sons of Granmar, who were aided by Sigrún's father and brothers. All her kinsmen were slain except one brother, Dag. He bound himself to peace with Helgi, but, notwithstanding, made sacrifices to Odin to obtain the loan of his spear, and with it slew Helgi. We have, therefore, in so much of the lay of Helgi Hundingslayer, the groundwork of the story of the ballads: a woman, who, as in many of the Ribold ballads, has been betrothed to a man she does not care for, gives herself to another; there is a fight, in which a great number of her kinsmen fall; one brother survives, who is the death of the man she loves. The lay of Helgi Hiörvard's son, whose story has much in common with that of his namesake, affords two resemblances of detail not found in the lay of the Hundingslayer. Helgi Hiörvard's son, while his life-blood is ebbing, expresses himself in almost the words of the dying Ribold: "The sword has come very near my heart." He then, like Ribold and Earl Brand, declares his wish that his wife should marry his brother, and she, like Guldborg, declines a second union.[113]
There is also a passage in the earlier history of Helgi Hundingslayer of which traces appear to be preserved in ballads, and before all in the English ballad 'Earl Brand,' A. Hunding and Helgi's family were at feud. Helgi introduced himself into Hunding's court as a spy, and when he was retiring sent word to Hunding's son that he had been there disguised as a son of Hagal, Helgi's foster-father. Hunding sent men to take him, and Helgi, to escape them, was forced to assume woman's clothes and grind at the mill. While Hunding's men are making search, a mysterious blind man, surnamed the bale-wise, or evil-witted (Blindr inn bölvísi), calls out, Sharp are the eyes of Hagal's maid; it is no churl's blood that stands at the mill; the stones are riving, the meal-trough is springing; a hard lot has befallen a war-king when a chieftain must grind strange barley; fitter for that hand is the sword-hilt than the mill-handle. Hagal pretends that the fierce-eyed maid is a virago whom Helgi had taken captive, and in the end Helgi escapes. This malicious personage reappears in the Hrômund saga as "Blind the Bad" and "the Carl Blind, surnamed Bavís," and is found elsewhere. His likeness to "old Carl Hood," who "comes for ill, but never for good," and who gives information of Earl Brand's flight with the king's daughter, does not require to be insisted on. Both are identical, we can scarcely doubt, with the blind [one-eyed] old man of many tales, who goes about in various disguises, sometimes as beggar, with his hood or hat slouched over his face,—that is Odin, the Síðhöttr or Deep-hood of Sæmund, who in the saga of Hálf and his champions is called simple Hood, as here, and expressly said to be Odin.[114] Odin, though not a thoroughly malignant divinity, had his dark side, and one of his titles in Sæmund's Edda is Bölverkr, maleficus. He first caused war by casting his spear among men, and Dag, after he has killed Helgi, says Odin was the author of all the mischief, for he brought strife among kinsmen.[115]
The disastrous effects of "naming" in a great emergency appear in other northern traditions, though not so frequently as one would expect. A diverting Swedish saga, which has been much quoted, relates how St. Olof bargained with a troll for the building of a huge church, the pay to be the sun and moon, or St. Olof himself. The holy man was equally amazed and embarrassed at seeing the building run up by the troll with great rapidity, but during a ramble among the hills had the good luck to discover that the troll's name was Wind and Weather, after which all was easy. For while the troll was on the roof of the church, Olof called out to him,
'Wind and Weather, hi!
You've set the spire awry;'
and the troll, thus called by his name, lost his strength, fell off, and was dashed into a hundred pieces, all flint stones. (Iduna, Part 3, p. 60 f, note. Other forms of the same story in Afzelius, Sago-Häfder, III, 100 f; Faye, Norske Folke-Sagn, p. 14, 2d ed.; Hofberg, Nerikes Gamla Minnen, p. 234.)
It is a Norwegian belief that when a nix assumes the human shape in order to carry some one off, it will be his death if the selected victim recognizes him and names him, and in this way a woman escaped in a ballad. She called out, So you are the Nix, that pestilent beast, and the nix "disappeared in red blood." (Faye, as above, p. 49, note.) A nix is baffled in the same way in a Færoe and an Icelandic ballad cited by Grundtvig, II, 57.
The marvellous horse Blak agrees to carry Waldemar [Hildebrand] over a great piece of water for the rescue of his daughter [sister], stipulating, however, that his name shall not be uttered. The rider forgets himself in a panic, calls to the horse by his name, and is thrown off into the water. The horse, whose powers had been supernatural, and who had been running over the water as if it were land, has now only ordinary strength, and is forced to swim. He brings the lady back on the same terms, which she keeps, but when he reaches the land he is bleeding at every hair, and falls dead. (Landstad, 58; Grundtvig, 62; Afzelius, 59, preface; Kristensen, I, No 66.)