26 WHAT IS A BALLAD?

the poem; they have been shortened also by the cuts applied by
the early compilers, such as the anonymous collector of the
Cancionero de Amberes (about 1545), cuts due apparently to the
pressure of entertainers at the reunions in which ballads were sung.
The length of the extant 'romances' is therefore less than that of
their first form, which may normally have been that of short
epics. The old French Gormond et Isembart has 661 lines, though
It is a true epic and the text is virtually complete; the Danish
Vise* of Tord af Havsgaard is actually longer than its original, the
Thrymkvida. None the less, it is characteristic of ballads to be
relatively short, since their range is from a few lines to several
hundreds; the epic range is from hundreds to thousands and tens
of thousands.

Ballad shortness is also qualitative, and that is what makes it
worth notice. When It is possible to compare them with epics or
novels, they are found to be either episodic or summary. The ballad
Is concerned either with one striking moment of the whole tale, or
It conveys to an unlettered audience a general impression of a
work from written literature. Sometimes both tendencies work to-
gether, as in ballads dealing with Tristan. In the Tristan story
there is one scene of paramount interest: Isolt dying of heart-break
stretched on the corpse of Tristan. To this everything else in the
long novel is either subordinate (episode of the love-drink) or
Irrelevant (Tristan's numerous battles). In Spain and in Iceland
an episodic treatment Is given to the theme. The ballad-poets take
into account only the last scene, though they work from different
versions of the event. In Spain the poet has squeezed the last three
chapters of Don Tristan de Leon-is into a few intensely dramatic
lines; the Icelandic poet takes more space since he heightens the
pathos by repetitions. In the Faeroes it is still the death scene that
occupies the attention, but the author of Tistrams tdttur introduces
the characters in a regular way and presents a complete novelette.
This summary treatment appears in the Danish Grimhild's Ven-
geance, the Spanish Marquis of Mantua and Montesinos as con-
trasted with the French epics Chevalerie Ogier and Awl, and the
Danish Holger Danske when compared with the Enfances Ogier.

These summaries are not only abbreviations of the originals but
void of circumstance. It is in this respect that they differ from the
summaries presented in such Eddie poems as the Gripispd and
Atlamdl, which are not as long as many ballads, and in this way