The modern poetical literature of Denmark opens with a collection of epical and lyrical poems from the Middle Ages, which are loosely connected under the title of KjÆmpeviser or Heroic Ballads. Of these the latest scholarship recognises nearly 500, but in the time of Borrow the number did not much exceed 200. These ballads deal with half-historic events, which are so completely masked by fantastic, supernatural and incoherent imagery that their positive relation to history can rarely be discovered. Nevertheless, they throw a very valuable light upon the manners of mediaeval society in Scandinavia, and they are often of high poetical beauty. No conjecture can be formed as to the authors of these ballads, and even the centuries in which they were composed are uncertain. Grimm believed them to be uralt, and attributed them to the 5th and 6th centuries. But on linguistic grounds, this extreme antiquity cannot be maintained. It is now supposed that they were composed at various times between 1300 and 1500, and that in their present form they bear the stamp of the period when they were first collected by the Danish antiquaries of the sixteenth century.

The circumstances in which this famous collection of folk-songs came into public notice were of a romantic nature. Sophia, Queen of Denmark, when sailing across the Sound in the year 1586, was driven by stress of weather to take shelter in the little island-harbour of Hveen, where the famous observatory stood, close by the house of the astronomer, Tycho Brahe. It so happened that at that very time Brahe was entertaining as a guest the most eminent Danish man of letters of that age, Anders SÖrensen Vedel (1542–1616). Vedel, whose labours were encyclopÆdic, was engaged in preserving all the monuments of Danish mediaeval history and learning which he could discover in the monasteries and libraries of Denmark. He had been much encouraged in this work by the Monk of Roeskilde, Peder Olufsen, who on his death-bed, about 1570, had placed in Vedel’s hands all the MSS. which he had collected. Queen Sophia, cloistered in the Ouranienborg with her antiquary and her astronomer, and waiting for the tempest to moderate, desired to be amused with stories of her national history. Vedel ventured to read to her some of the legendary poems which still lingered among the people, and she was so enchanted with them, that she commanded him, when he returned to the mainland, to make a collection of these ballads and publish them.

Accordingly, in 1591, Vedel issued from the private printing-press in his house called Liljeborg at Ribe in Jutland, a selection of 100 mediaeval ballads, under the title of Et Hundred udvalgte danske Viser. This volume is one of the landmarks of Scandinavian, and indeed of European, literary history. Vedel made another collection, this time of ancient love-ballads, which he called Tragica; it was not published until 1657, long after his death. But the volume of 1591 is the fountain-head of all that has since been written about the Heroic Ballads of the North, and it is impossible to overrate the services of Vedel in preserving what was even then ready to disappear. It seems, moreover, that he was careful of the text, and later scholarship has come more and more to place confidence in his transcripts.

This was, unfortunately, not the case with the next pioneer in the same field, although he deserves great credit also. Peter Petersen Syv (1631–1702) was a very able philologist, who was also a minor poet of ambition. In 1695 he reprinted and edited Vedel’s text, adding 100 more kjÆmpeviser which had been unknown to Vedel. But his work was not so well done; Syv was something of a pedant, and unfortunately either too critical or not critical enough. He ventured to correct the irregularities of the ballads, and not seldom has spoiled them. He bore the proud title of Philologer Royal of Denmark, and he was above all things else a grammarian. But he added to our store of Ballads. No one, during the eighteenth century, advanced on the labours of Vedel and Syv, and their treasuries of beautiful anonymous poetry seem to have attracted no attention in the rest of Europe.

But in the first decade of the nineteenth century, in consequence of what we call the Romantic Revival, poets and scholars in many countries turned simultaneously to the treasure-house of Danish balladry. Jamieson’s work, to which I shall presently return, dates from 1806; about the same time Herder translated one or two kjÆmpeviser in his Stimmen der VÖlker, and in 1809 Wilhelm Carl Grimm started his full translation, under the title of AltdÄnische Heldenlieder, Balladen and MÄrchen, which appeared in 1811. But it appears that Grimm had heard and perhaps even seen the proofs of a Danish edition of the very highest importance, the Udvalgte Danske Viser fra Middlealderen, the first volume of which was brought out by Abrahamson, Nyerup and Rahbek in 1812. [9] Abrahamson dropped out, but the work was completed by the others, the fifth and last volume appearing in 1814.

Borrow’s relation to these texts must now be considered, and it offers some difficulty. In 1826 he published a volume of verse entitled Romantic Ballads translated from the Danish, and in the preface he uses these words:—“I expect shortly to lay before the public a complete translation of the KiÆmpÉ Viser, made by me some years ago.” It is necessary to bear in mind that there are these two collections of Borrow’s translations from the kjÆmpeviser, the second of which, as we shall see, he did not contrive to publish.

No doubt, he was anxious to emphasise the novelty and rarity of his literary adventures. But his attitude to Jamieson is very strange. As early as 1806 Robert Jamieson (1780–1844) had published a volume of Popular Ballads, in which he had translated several of the kjÆmpeviser and had pointed out their value in relation to the ancient Scottish poems of a similar kind. Sir Walter Scott paid much flattering attention to Jamieson’s work, which also attracted a good deal of notice in Denmark and Germany, and inspired the Drei altschottische Lieder of G. D. GrÄter (1813). It is scarcely possible that Borrow was not aware of all this, yet he never mentions the name of Jamieson, and in 1826 he spoke boldly of himself as breaking into “unknown and untrodden paths.” It is not impossible that Sir Walter Scott’s patronage of Jamieson had something to do with the ungenerous petulance of Borrow’s references to the great novelist in Lavengro.

But Borrow’s attitude to the contemporary scholars of Denmark is still more surprising. Without saying so in exact words, he gives us to understand that he translated all the kjÆmpeviser from the original edition of Vedel. It would be rash to say that Borrow was not acquainted with the Danske Viser of 1591, for he does, in one place, quote, whether at first-hand or not, from Vedel’s preface. But it requires great faith to accept his own account of his approach to the poems. In Lavengro, at a point which Knapp has dated 1820, Borrow tells with brilliant picturesqueness how he purchased, by permitting the wife of an elderly yeoman to kiss his cheek, “a strange and uncouth-looking volume” which had formed part of the kit of some red-haired fishermen who were wrecked on the Norfolk coast:—

It was not very large, but instead of the usual covering was bound in wood, and was compassed with strong iron clasps. It was a printed book, but the pages were not of paper, but vellum, and the characters were black, and resembled those generally termed Gothic. . . . And now I had in my possession a Danish book, which, from its appearance, might be supposed to have belonged to the very old Danes indeed: but how was I to turn it to any account? I had the book it is true, but I did not understand the language, and how was I to overcome that difficulty? Hardly by poring over the book; yet I did pore over the book again, but with all my poring I could not understand it; and then I became angry, and I bit my lips till the blood came; and I occasionally tore a handful from my hair and flung it upon the floor, but that did not mend the matter, for still I did not understand the book, which however I began to see was written in rhyme. . . . For the book was a book of ballads, about the deeds of knights and champions, and men of huge stature. . . . collected by one Anders Vedel.

This story of a vellum copy of the rare edition of 1591 thrown up on the shore of Norfolk with a common sailor’s effects is told in Borrow’s best style. But how far is it true? Whether it is entirely or only partly romance, the inference that Borrow translated the kjÆmpeviser by the light of nature from this “Gothic” text must be abandoned. He may or may not have handled a copy of Vedel, but he made his translations, as internal evidence amply proves, from the five volumes of Abrahamson, Nyerup and Rahbek, published between 1812 and 1814. This was a cheap and highly accessible edition, and was in the hands of the booksellers complete at least six years before Borrow began to read Danish. He accepted the text of these scholars and their arrangement; he translated their notes word for word,—and gave them out as his own; his volume of 1826 and the privately printed later ballads are wholly founded upon Abrahamson, Nyerup and Rahbek, and yet, so far as I can discover, he never mentions their names in any part of his writings. He professed that the public should believe his knowledge to be wholly derived from a mysterious black-letter volume washed up on the sands of his native county, and read by him with agonies of labour by the pure light of divination.

In January, 1830, a prospectus was put forth in which “The Songs of Scandinavia, translated by Dr. Bowring and Mr. Borrow” was offered to subscribers at the price of a guinea. This was an attempt on the part of Borrow, languidly assented to by Bowring, to give publicity to some 70 kjÆmpeviser which the former had translated since the publication of his Romantic Ballads of 1826. “I am terribly afraid,” writes Borrow, “of being forestalled in the KÆmpe Viser by some of those Scotch blackguards,” a hit, no doubt, at Jamieson. He was working hard at his translations, and he was further stimulated by meeting in London with the Danish theologian and poetical student, Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, who had done much to popularise the kjÆmpeviser in his native country. But Bowring proved a broken reed, and Borrow suffered once again one of those disappointments which so naturally embittered him. It was not until 1874, however, some seven years before his death, that he finally gave up all hope. The MSS. of his translations of the kjÆmpeviser passed into the hands of Mrs. MacOubrey.

The ballad of Grimhild’s Vengeance (Grimhilds Hevn) is given in three versions by Abrahamson, Nyerup and Rahbek. Borrow has closely followed the editors of 1812 and has translated each of the versions. He added a number of notes, the MS. of which is mutilated, but not so much so as to prevent us from observing that these are translated word for word from the appendix of Abrahamson, Nyerup and Rahbek, but, so far as can be discerned from the fragmentary and mutilated Manuscripts at our disposal, without a sign of acknowledgment.

Edmund Gosse.