THE DESCENT OF BALLADS 103

Brunamont to save Lady Gloriande for his friend Karaheut, and
the twelfth-century Chevalerie retailing Charlemagne's injustice
and Ogier's long pursuit of revenge. In each case the ballad poet
has simplified a complex epic situation. The Dane cannot spare
time to explain why Karaheut does not fight for his own bride, nor
how Ogier comes to be a prisoner and yet a friend to some of his
captors; he merely supposes that there was cowardice somewhere.
The Castilian poet ignores the whole feudal system, which prevents
Charlemagne from offering his son Chariot to Ogier's vengeance,
but causes the emperor to consent at once, instead of after ten
thousand lines, and to hurry on a farouche trial. The name Holger
Danske was enough to make this hero famous as a defender of
Danish liberties, and the refrain 'Holger Danske, he won victory
over Burmand' seemed worthy to be carved on a Swedish chapel
in the fifteenth century. Burmand represented the German menace
with poetic vagueness; to make the point clearer, there arose the
companion ballad of King Diderik and Holger. It was from such
examples that the defenders of the Danneverk took heart in 1864.
In the other peninsula, it is clear that 'Danish UrgelV setting out
from Mantua was the model for Don Quixote's first sally.

Whether the epic or a chapbook served as immediate model of
the Spanish ballad is uncertain. The ballad summarizes the whole
epic plot, which is one of injury and vengeance, but omits all those
considerations which make for epic length. Had Charlemagne
consented to punish Chariot, Ogier de Dinamarche would have
concluded within three hundred lines; at long last Chariot is sur-
rendered to Ogier as the price of his assistance in a time of
desperate need. The ballad poet does what the epic poet avoided
doing; the latter wished to spin out a long tale, the former to give
the gist of the matter. The same treatment is given to the French
Awl by the author of the Spanish Montesinos ballads, to Aimeri de
Narbonne in a brief fragment, &c. It is sometimes uncertain
whether a Castilian ballad has the authority of a French epos or
chapbook, as in the Valdovinos series and Guarinos. Gerimldo, one
of the most popular of Castilian ballads, is vaguely Carolingian;
it is connected with the legend of Eginhard's love for Emma, but
it hardly amounts to more, in its ballad shape, than an improvisation
on the theme of 'the squire of low degree'. On the other hand, the
Carolingian convention is such in Spain, that common international
ballad stuff is given a Carolingian setting, This is the case with