Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/136

118 more heathen than Christian. Especially striking is also the popularity which St. Jörgen (St. George) enjoyed among the nations of the North. There can be no doubt that this was due to a union of Christian ideas with imperishable memories of heathendom. St. George acquired a special prominence, for while his fight with the dragon symbolized the struggle between Christianity and the devil, it at the same time commemorated Thor's fight with the midgard-serpent and the combat between Sigurd and Fafner.

Although we have included all these songs under the general head of mythical ballads, still this term does not apply absolutely to all the poems embraced in this category, but we trust it indicates with sufficient clearness the fact we wished to establish. Regardless of their real poetical value, these ballads are of the deepest interest on account of the unique and instructive light they throw on the manner in which the heathen and Christian ideas confronted each other in the middle age. These ballads illustrate how many of the old myths were preserved in a more or less modified form, and how during the amalgamation of the different elements a very strange and romantic view of nature was developed. The second group, which embraces the historical ballads and those closely allied to them, acquires its chief importance from its abundance of vivid and highly colored pictures of middle-age life and view of things in general, which are presented to us precisely as they must have looked to the people of that time. These ballads portray to us no less graphically how certain important events were conceived and transformed by the masses. While the mythic ballads are chiefly transformations or adaptations of the poems of a more remote period, or while they, at all events, are so completely based on traditions from the heathen time that they belong, so to speak, to both ages, the historical ballads and those belonging to the same general group, contain the poetry, thoughts and views of life of the middle-age proper. When the history of the age was to be told the vernacular was