Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/144

126 in England, Germany or the North, but it cannot have been long before it was universally adopted.

The popular ballads furnish a strong and cheering proof of the poetical activity in Denmark throughout the middle age. The grand age of the Waldemars, the golden age of Denmark, and then the deep humiliation, when the country, thoroughly subjugated by German princes, was brought to the verge of ruin, all this is powerfully and distinctly mirrored in the ballads, which in the most touching strains express the joy and sorrow of the people. But this natural poetry welling forth from the inmost recesses of the people's soul is, in connection with the chronicles of Saxo and Svend Aagesen, all the middle age literature of any importance of which Denmark can boast.

Of secular poetry of art there are no traces whatever except what was borrowed from foreign literatures. Toward the close of the middle age and in the beginning of the reformation period a number of romances and tales of chivalry from the circle of stories of Charlemagne, King Artus and his knights, etc., made their way, in versified and prose translations and adaptations, into Denmark from the rest of Europe, where they had already long been read with great delight. In Denmark they shared the fate of the ballads; they were first received in the higher circles, where they