Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/141

Rh gifted poets among the nobles themselves, so that the poetry may be said to have sprung from the very flower of the nation, are questions that cannot be satisfactorily answered. The latter hypothesis seems the most plausible; at all events the castles were the true homes of the ballads. For a long time they were also limited exclusively to these until they in the beginning of the fifteenth century gradually went out of fashion, and were crowded out by romances of chivalry, erotic poetry, and popular tales. In this manner they made their way to the lower strata of the population, where they also, on account of their popular character, became the property of the people, since they expressed feelings and sentiments in a manner intelligible and pleasing to all, sentiments that could be felt and appreciated by the great and the lowly, by nobleman and peasant alike. By the common people they were faithfully preserved until the second half of the sixteenth century, when an interest for them again revived among the nobility, and when it especially became the custom of the noble women to collect and put in writing old songs from the lips of the people. The printed collection of ballads, of which that of Vedel of 1592 is the oldest, constituted for centuries a favorite reading, and at the same time oral tradition has continued even down to the present. Many a ballad that has never been taken down in writing has thus been preserved until the interest awakened in modern times for the monuments of the past made it a matter of duty to collect everything of this kind that could be found. Certain localities of the North are particularly rich in old ballads, and the Hammerum Harde in northwestern Jutland is a striking example of this. In this desolate heath-region, where the popular life assumed a peculiar character created by the "Bindestuer" (rooms in which people get together for the purpose of knitting; they are now fast disappearing), the conditions were most favorable for the preservation of the old ballads and legends. In the long winter evenings old and young would assemble at the larger farms, each provided with his