Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/237

Rh which the diligent and careful compiler of this volume has been so fortunate as to bring to the light of day, and that just at the last moment, when the treasure threatened to sink irrecoverably into the earth, along with the poor old folks who were its last custodians."

Besides giving the text of the ballads, Kristensen wisely insisted on printing the melodies as well. It was in vain to tell him that from a musical point of view these were mainly worthless; the fact remained that only by means of the melody had the ballad been preserved, and that in the minds of those who had preserved it, words and music were inseparably associated. To give the one without the other would have been untrue to Kristensen's first principle in collecting, for it would have given an imperfect reproduction of the actual facts. Besides, their presence in these volumes is a standing reminder of what one is sometimes apt to forget, that ballads are as much a part of popular music as of popular poetry, and that they are really more closely related to song than to forms of narrative verse.

The second collection, published in 1874, also contained a large number of ballads which were either previously unknown in Denmark or only found in single copies two or three centuries old. Grundtvig saw this volume through the press; and the material it afforded was naturally of the highest value for his great work, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser. How much he appreciated the labours of the Jutland schoolmaster was evinced in a rather strange way in the year 1875, when he made the remarkable proposal to purchase the fairy tales which Kristensen had already collected, and utilize them as his own literary property. Of joint editing he would not hear, with the result that henceforth the two men's labours lay quite apart, although some parts of Grundtvig's collections of Æventyr were derived from materials previously obtained from Kristensen.

The third volume, which appeared in 1889, is less rich in new matter than the previous ones, but supplies many