Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/143

Rh earlier than the twelfth century, still the popular poetry, considered as a whole, must be much older. The mythic ballads and the songs kindred to them, which, as we have seen, are in many ways connected with the ancient poetry, and which in part are mere corruptions of older songs, must of needs belong to a time when the poetry and the ideas on which they are based were still fresh in the memory of the people. The transition from the older to the younger form can hardly be placed later than the eleventh century, and at about this time occurred the change of the ideas handed down from antiquity into the new form, until the time became ripe for a poetry in every respect independent, that is to say, for the historical ballads.

That this is correct can also be inferred from the circumstance that in the first half of the twelfth century there was a large influx of German ballads into Denmark; for it is scarcely probable that the transformation of old songs into heroic ballads was contemporaneous with the introduction of foreign poetry. Nor is it possible to assume that the transformation took place after that period. Every circumstance favors the theory by which we refer the beginning of ballad literature to the eleventh century, and this may be done the more safely since we have immutable and incontrovertable proof that the peculiar form of the heroic ballad existed in the time of Knud the Great (1014-1035). For in an old English conventual chronicle from the eleventh century we read that when the king with his queen and followers once happened to be rowing in a boat toward the convent of Ely he gave vent to his joy in a ballad, which he composed on the spur of the moment, and in which he requested his followers to join him in singing. A few lines of this ballad have been preserved, and they leave no room for doubt that it is the heroic ballad fully developed, and it is not to be confounded with the skaldic lay. King Knud's ballad was sung in the English tongue. It is, however, very difficult to determine where the new form was first developed, whether