in England, Germany or the North, but it cannot have been long before it was universally adopted.[1]
The popular ballads furnish a strong and cheering proof of the poetical activity in Denmark throughout the middle age. The grand age of the Waldemars, the golden age of Denmark, and then the deep humiliation, when the country, thoroughly subjugated by German princes, was brought to the verge of ruin, all this is powerfully and distinctly mirrored in the ballads, which in the most touching strains express the joy and sorrow of the people. But this natural poetry welling forth from the inmost recesses of the people's soul is, in connection with the chronicles of Saxo and Svend Aagesen, all the middle age literature of any importance of which Denmark can boast.[2]
Of secular poetry of art there are no traces whatever except what was borrowed from foreign literatures. Toward the close of the middle age and in the beginning of the reformation period a number of romances and tales of chivalry from the circle of stories of Charlemagne, King Artus and his knights, etc., made their way, in versified and prose translations and adaptations, into Denmark from the rest of Europe, where they had already long been read with great delight. In Denmark they shared the fate of the ballads; they were first received in the higher circles, where they
- ↑ The Norwegian Professor, Storm, in his work, "Sagnkredsene om Karl den Store og Didrik af Bern," Christiania, 1874, has with great ability advocated a totally different theory from the one here presented concerning the age of the ballads and the manner of their origin. We confine ourselves here simply to noting that he endeavors to prove that the metre of the Scandinavian ballads was modelled after that employed in the court-poetry of Germany, and that this can not be older than from the fourteenth or possibly from, the end of the thirteenth century.
- ↑ The chief collection of Danish ballads is "Danmark's gamle Folkeviser," udgivne af Sv. Grundtvig, Copenhagen, 1853. A very comprehensive, but very uncritical collection was published by Abrahamson, Nyerup and Rahbek: "Udvalgte danske Viser fra Middelalderen"; "Norske Folkeviser," samlede og udgivne af M. B. Landstad, Christiania, 1833; "Gamle norske Folkeviser," samlede og udgivne af Sofus Bugge, Christiania, 1838; "Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen," übersetzt von W. Grimm, Heidelberg, 1811; Talvj: "Versuch einer geschtl. Charakteristic der Volklieder germ. Nationen," Leipsic, 1840.
