Book Description

It may be assumed that the student who approaches the Danish Ballads has already acquired some acquaintance with the prevailing theories as to the origin of Ballads in general. On that dark and debatable question I am unqualified to enter. To the earnest beginner I commend Dr. T. F. Henderson’s excellent Cambridge Manual The Ballad in Literature, where the opinions of Child, Gummere, Kittredge, and other authorities, are discussed with lucidity, learning, and common-sense. Suffice it here and now to say that those who push to extremes the theory of Communal Authorship must be capable of belief in that mythological personage who was born of nine mothers. While some Ballads (with their Incremental Repetition and so forth) were obviously created between leader and chorus in the Dance, others, no less obviously, were the work of individual poets. As the nineteenth century had its Walter Scott and its Hawker of Moorwinstow, so earlier ages had the anonymous minstrels who stamped the mark of original genius on “Niels Ebbeson” and “Sir Patrick Spens.” “At the period when these songs were born, classes were mingled together, or rather did not as yet exist. The people was one; it was the élite, the best among them, who interpreted what all felt, but all could not express—who sang in the name of all. And thus it is that this poetry belongs to the populace as a whole.... It resembles a stone constantly rolled by the waves” (Pineau). Child, moreover, points out that the British Ballad “was not originally the property of the common orders among the people”—and in Denmark, says Henderson, “it was fostered and favoured more particularly by the upper classes, and was for some centuries the chief medium of literary expression and culture.” In Denmark, as elsewhere, the more primitive forms of the Ballad were closely connected with the Dance—thecarole, or circular dance with joined hands, accompanied by the voice; a pastime which still survives in the Faroë Islands. The word Ballad, indeed, is derived from the South Italian ballare = to dance, which in its turn comes from the Greek. The Teutonic tribes, whose sword-dances are mentioned by Tacitus, may, in the beginning, have learnt dancing from the Celts. Be that as it may, the round dance became popular throughout Europe during the early Middle Ages (roughly speaking, between 1149-1400), and took the North by storm, from the King’s court to the Icelandic farmstead. The dance-songs made light of frontiers, just as the Australian corroborees pass, irrespective of language, from tribe to tribe. Vainly did Saxo Grammaticus record his opinion that “such mountebank antics” (gøglerspring) were unworthy of persons of quality. Every knight had his own dancing-ground—as do Papuan chiefs at the present day. Vainly did the Church frown on a pastime associated with Beltane fires, and other unhallowed survivals of paganism. Absalon, it is true, when in 1158 he became Bishop of Sjælland, put a stop to light-heeled frolic among the merry monks of Eskilø. The Copenhagen clergy in 1425 forbade “heathen” songs and dances on the Feast of S. John. But the churchyard was still the popular place to dance in, especially on the wake-nights of the greater festivals, when the people assembled from far and near. England behaved no better; a shocking record exists of an English priest, so obsessed by the refrain which had rung in his ears all night, that he began the Mass with “myn hertë swete!”