Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/142

124 woollen stocking, and there the old traditions were related by persons who excelled in knowledge of them. Here therefore the harvest of ballads handed down from generation to generation was particularly abundant. In Thelemark, in Norway, there is also to be found a large store of popular songs.

In reference to the of the ballads we have the historical ballads as our only safe guide. It would not be safe to assume that a song, describing an event, was composed immediately after the event, and that it then received its present form; but still the composition must have taken place before the persons and circumstances described had faded from the memory of the poet. If we keep this principle in mind, we will arrive at the result that the golden period of the historical ballads, the age of which extends from the beginning of the twelfth century to the Reformation, must have been the latter half of the twelfth and the whole of the thirteenth century; for from this period, confining ourselves to Denmark alone, we have of purely Danish ballads about thirty to each century, while from the remaining three hundred years there is not that number of ballads. This result is perfectly natural, for the period which produced the greatest number of ballads was also the richest in events and in all respects the best period of the Danish middle age. Its stirring times and its high degree of culture necessarily gave this period the conditions for the production of this kind of poetry. In the ballads of Marshal Stig with their tragic descriptions of the guilt of the king (Erik Glipping) and of his marshal, as well as of the calamities which it brought upon the whole land, this poetry reaches its climax. Full of energy it bursts forth again in the ballad about Niels Ebbesen, and then it gradually vanishes, though it still now and then sends forth a vigorous bud, as it did, for the last time, in the beautiful allegorical poem about Christian II and the nobility.

Thus, while we can not place the first historical ballads