THE DESCENT OF BALLADS 93

rhapsodes of the last epoch of epic recitations had been unable to alter
or had been lucky enough to imagine in their search for new sensations.
These passages, thus conserved and often repeated by heart, when iso-
lated by the surrounding people, became the oldest extant ballads.

It is the theory of 'fragmentation'. In more recent essays Sr.
Menendez Pidal has given this doctrine a less mechanical cast,
allowing a greater place to the artistic sense of the ballad-maker.
The application has been to Spanish conditions only. It assumes
(what is not established) the superior antiquity of the epical ballads
in the Romancero, and goes on to assert that these established a
mould into which other sorts of 'romances' could be cast. In other
countries we find evidence of contact between epic poems and
ballads, in which the latter are of younger birth. A straightforward
theory of fragmentation would be difficult to apply, since the epic
originals are, outside Spain, almost wholly conjectural. A brief
survey of the whole ground will show that there are points in
common between the Spanish experience and that of other
lands.

There is only one case in all Europe in which we can place a
ballad against its indubitable original in the older style, viz. when
comparing the Danish Tord af Havsgaard with the Eddie Thryms-
kvida. The ballad is known also in Sweden and Norway, but the
Danish version has been known from the sixteenth century, and
is fuller and better. The two poems are of almost equal length,
the ballad being somewhat longer, thanks to its looser struc-
ture and repetitions. Individual phrases are preserved as well
as the general outline, but there has been a subtle change of the
poetic temperature. The Thor of the Thrymskvida is a god of
Asgard, named by a liturgical name, and acting in the correct rela-
tionship to Loki and Freya. The Thor of Tord af Havsgaard is a
farmer:

Now there was Thor of Sea-garth,
rides over the fair green lea,

and he has lost his hammer of gold,
was taken so far away.

Thor, he tameth his foals on the heath.

Freya is a 'proud young miss' and Loki is cLokke the jester*, and
the giant Thrym of mythological Jotunheim has become 'the old
troll-count' of N0rrefjaeld. The divine Hammer has no mythical
powers, and Thor's eating and beating are merely a huge jest: