Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/130

112 true, appear in a very disguised form, since neither the reciter nor the scribe understood their purport, so that only a far advanced linguistic science has been able to interpret them. In this respect, and in spite of the levelling influence of tradition, the ballads have m many ways preserved traces of what they owe to antiquity.

By their contents, the ballads are divided into two principal groups: 1. The and, including songs of magic and versified wonder-stories. 2. of, to which may be added various other categories of songs, chiefly relating to the adventures of knights.

In the of these groups we include all those songs which are more or less definitely connected with the ancient mythic and heroic poetry. Some of them are mere transformations of old songs with which we are familiar in their original form, and this applies, for instance, to the ballads, "Tor on Havsgaard" and "Young Sveidal." The former is based on the exquisite old lay about the god Thor, when disguised as Freyja, with Loke as his handmaid, he recovers his hammer from Jotunheim (Thrymskviða). In the ballad we are able to trace the plot worked out in the old lay, step by step, and hence the lay, which was popular throughout the North, must have received its present form at a time when the myth still lived in the memory of the people, though it was no longer an object of faith; that is to say, soon after the introduction of Christianity. The memory of the god Thor, particularly, continued in many ways in the North. In a most suggestive manner it was applied to Christian legendary heroes like Olaf the Saint, and even at the present time it survives in popular legends. Thus it is quite natural that the ballad which represents in the purest and clearest manner the transformation of an old mythic lay, should by preference be connected with that divinity. In the ballad the myth has of course been conceived and rendered as a merry story. Thor is no more the god of Asgard, but the nobleman, "Tor