Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/131

Rh of Havsgaard," Freyja becomes the "Maid of Fröjeborg," etc. The humor of the original poem has been preserved in the ballad in a fresh and charming manner. "Young Sveidal" is a very interesting paraphrase of an ancient poem, of which a few fragments have been preserved in the two Edda songs, "Gróugaldr" and "Fjölsvinnsmál. In the form in which these songs are preserved in the Edda, and which they accordingly must have assumed before they were committed to writing in that country, they appear as two distinct poems which are in no way related to each other; but the ballad furnishes conclusive evidence of their original unity, and also contributes in many ways to a better understanding of these obscure lays on which it is based. The obscure ballad, Svend Vonved, which we possess only in a very imperfect form, also points, both in its general structure and in many of its details, to the mythical poetry as its source. We are not able, as was the case in the other ballads, to point to some particular poem of antiquity as its foundation, but in all probability it is based on some heathen religious poem which has been lost.

Of the heroic poetry of antiquity we also find several more or less distinct traces in the popular ballads. The whole group of songs which are designated by the term "Heldenlieder" (heroic lays) in German, constitute one class, in which the heroic ideas inherited from the past are blended with the cosmic views of the middle age. That powerful, oftentimes grotesque, imagination which we constantly meet with in many of the ballads and which may properly be compared with that which we find in many of the popular tales and legends of the North, also has its root in the heathen age. But the popular ballads are also related to the poetry of antiquity in respect to contents, and we discover in them many of the myths and mythic groups which served as the basis of the

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