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 less genuine, and less characteristic. It was from minstrels at bridal-feasts, from boatmen on the fjords, from old blind vagabonds and the household paupers who form so strange a feature of a Norse peasant community, that they obtained most of their best stories; and it is a significant fact that almost all these professional reciters are now dead. Had Asbjörnsen and Moe neglected the duty of preserving the ancient legends, they would now, in all probability, be lost beyond the chance of restoration.

The stories must now be left to speak for themselves. Of the wonderful links that comparative mythology has found in them, chains that bind Norway in one brotherhood with Ireland and Germany, with Wallachia and Hindustan, nothing needs be said in a popular selection like the present. The stories are charming as tales of primitive Norse life, and if mythologists can find by dissecting them an undergrowth of ancient history, that is an additional pleasure for them. It is difficult to doubt that though Asbjörnsen is himself a learned saw in this species of science, it is mainly the tale that has delighted him, the quaint wit, the savage pathos, the intimate and tender sympathy with all that is wild and solitary in the nature of his fatherland. And as a literary artist this is his highest praise, that he has contrived to lay the peculiarities of Norwegian landscape before his readers with a subtlety of touch such as no other poet or proseman has achieved—not by description so much as by a series of those sympathetic and brilliant touches which