Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/135

Rh tations. These, too, are based on superstitions handed down from heathendom, and they simply assumed a somewhat different form during the middle age. Closely allied to these are the songs of the supernatural, terrible power of the runes. The belief in ghosts and apparitions, which occurs in many Danish ballads, as in "Svend Dyring," "Aage and Else," etc., is also founded on very ancient representations of "drows" and "hill-dwellers" which had been transmitted almost without change from time immemorial.

Thus we see at every point where it could be expected a remarkably well preserved connection between the views concerning the supernatural in the poetry of antiquity and in the middle-age ballad.

But it is still more surprising to find this same relation existing in a field where we would hardly look for it, that is to say in the ballads of Christian miracles or legendary songs, which have for their themes episodes from the life of Christ and of the saints. Thus King Olaf the Saint and his fight with the evil spirits (the trolls) is blended with the god Thor and his fight with the giants, and the king even inherits the red-beard of Asa-Thor. An Icelandic skaldic lay describes Christ sitting at the fountain of Urd, and the old poem Solarljoð in the Elder Edda, with its remarkable struggle between the asa-faith and Christianity, is closely connected with the Norwegian ballad Draumkvæði, in which we can in a few passages trace the very words of the original poem. In Danish ballads too mythical ideas are applied to the life of Jesus, as, for example, the episode of the blind Hoder, who pierces Balder with his arrow.

Many of the saints who are celebrated in the legendary ballads are in reality the old heathen gods in a Christian dress, and the whole outline of these songs is frequently