Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/139

Rh middle age, when the clergy had already become very much degenerated, and form the transition to the satires of the age of the reformation.

The popular poetry, which we have now sketched, is not, as above stated, especially a product of Denmark, though we have centred our attention on this country, but it belongs to the entire group of Teutonic nationalities. A poetry of precisely the same kind is found not only in all the Northern countries, but also in Germany, England, and Scotland, while the Icelandic and Faroese rimas must also be embraced in the same category. Many ballads have been transplanted from the country in which they originated into another and there become naturalized, a fact peculiarly true of the three northern countries, in which during the age of the greatest bloom of this poetry there was a strong reciprocal influence, so that it is now often almost impossible to determine to which country a given ballad originally belonged. It is, of course, most easy to determine the locality of the historical ballads, but these, too, were frequently scattered over the whole North.

This phenomenon is, in a large measure, explained by the fact that these ballads were invariably intended to be sung, and as a rule are an accompaniment to the dance, just as this is still practised in the Fareys. The melodies composed simultaneously with the words which are characterized by a charming simplicity, easily carried the songs from one country to another, and only such changes would be made in the text as were made necessary by the slight differences of language, and thenceforth the imported songs would go hand in hand with the native ones.

Like the poetry of antiquity the most splendid remnants of which have been preserved in the Elder Edda, the northern poetry of the middle age must be characterized. This term being ambiguous requires a more exact definition. We do not know the authors of the ballads, all of which have come down to us anonymously; but they owe their origin to