Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/145

Rh soon gained such a foothold that they banished the ballads. This could scarcely have happened had there not been a marked decline in poetic taste; for whatever merit many of the imported productions may have possessed in their original form, still in the form in which they reached the North, that is, in second or third-hand translations, they had unquestionably lost much of their poetic spirit. When the art of printing was introduced, they spread rapidly into wider circles and finally reached the lowest classes of the people. Many of them, and among these the chronicle of the Emperor Charlemagne and the story of Griseldis, have continued to this day as books for the people.

Of the rhymed compositions of this class are the, which owe their name to the fact that the Norwegian queen Euphemia, the wife of Hakon Magnusson, introduced them in Norway about the year 1300. From the Norwegian they were probably translated into Swedish, and we know with certainty that they were translated from Swedish into Danish. Two of the poems, Iwein the lion-knight and Duke Frederick of Normandy, with their glowing descriptions of the life of chivalry, with their deeds of heroism and adventures of love, belong to the circle of Artus legends, while a third is the celebrated love romance of Flores and Blanseflor. They came originally from France, but probably reached the North in German versions. The Norse Euphemia rhymes are doubtless not translations, but rather versified adaptations of works originally written in prose. Not one among them can be regarded as original, at least none such has yet been found. The same is probably true of three poems in the Danish language. These are: the dwarf-king Lavrin, who is here connected with the legend circle of Dietrich of Bern; Persenober and Konstantionobis, an adaptation of the French romance of Patronopseus; and finally the chaste queen. The last treats of a queen who, during the absence of her husband, has to endure the importunities of a faithless courtier, and on the king's return is slandered