GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 201

Latin Waltharius, of the tenth century, is a poem of some length.
The style is delayed at places by the use of Latin cliches, but in
other places it is sober and bare where one would expect Germanic
cliches. The Anglo-Saxon evidence, therefore, tends to indicate
that the fsongs of an almost historical sort' were not ballads but
short epics, suited to recitation in the long evenings of winter In the
great banqueting halls. So Beowulf himself is represented as
entertaining the court of Hrothgar in Heorot.

Of these pieces only the poems of Walter have given rise to
ballads, thanks to their coalescing with various old French novelistic
poems. The German Hildebranddied is a younger poem, dating
from the ninth century and now extant in a mixed dialect.
Hildebrand is a hero of only one achievement; he fights with, and
conquers, his son. That is a very widespread motif, one which only
requires to be capped by names. There is little to compel us to
believe that the song of Hildebrand preserved any authentic tradi-
tion of the Goths of Verona, or that it was other than a composition
by some ninth-century German poet. The episode was in-
corporated in the Low German Dietrichs Saga, of the late twelfth
century, where it has the optimistic ending later to characterize
the German ballad. While the evidence is not conclusive, it is at
least arguable that there is no direct contact bet\veen the epic frag-
ment and the ballad In this case, but that the episode came to the
ballad-poet through the mediation of the saga. This saga was trans-
lated in the early thirteenth century Into Old Norse, and in that
form is the undoubted source of the Danish ballads of Dlderik and
Vidrik Verlandss0n, some of the most stirring in the collection.
Rather than an authentic Germanic tradition, the legend of
Dietrich von Bern Is an encyclopedia of Germanic adventure,
assembled In the late twelfth century, not without assistance from
the Carolingian and Arthurian models.

In the Beowulf 'we find a sketch of the plot of the Nibelung story
before the invention of Siegfried-Sigurd. Sigurd Is the hero of a
number of lays in the older Edda which are either episodic or
summary. They resemble ballads in these two respects, and in
their anonymity, but they differ In their aristocratic appeal. They
are the property of trained reciters who will respect their texts, not
of amorphous tradition. We have, in these lays, specimens of a last
epoch of northern alliterative verse, approximating to the ballad
style which was to rise in the twelfth century in Denmark, but later

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