2oz NORDIC BALLADS

in the neighbouring countries. Appeal has been made to the Eddie
lays to determine the form of the primitive Germanic epos. They
are brief, nervous, and highly dramatic. But these qualities may
well be secondary. The Eddie poems are not self-explanatory; on
the contrary the prose introductions are designed to set each of
them in their context in some larger traditional narrative. Two
traditions, indeed, are mentioned, the one as current in the north,
the other as from Germany. What the poets have done is to pick
out salient episodes of the pre-existing tradition, and to realize to
the full their dramatic possibilities; they have also, in the Atlamdl
and Atlakvida, offered summaries of the intensely dramatic con-
clusion of the poem. These Eddie lays, alone or in combination
with sagas (Tfridrekssaga, Volsungasaga), have given rise to Danish
and Faeroese ballads of the Nibelung cycles. Similarly, the Eddie
Smpdagsmdl is the source of the Danish Ungen Svejdal, the poetical
fragments of the Hervararsaga are the source of the ballad Alf of
Qdderskser, and there is a resemblance between the second Helgi
lay and the tragic poem of Ribold and Guldborg (The Douglas
Tragedy). One Eddie poem of a religious cast has had ballad
consequences. This is the Thrymskvida. The Danish Tord af
Havsgaard is so faithful a transposition of this lay into the ballad
style, that the transposer must have had the very words of the
Edda ringing in his ears. The older Edda is, therefore, a mediator
between the primitive epics and the medieval ballads.

Other mediators were the refashioned and amplified German
epics of the twelfth century. Their authors have profited by the
technical advances of the French jongleurs. They show a new
amplitude, a new skill in weaving episodes, a new eloquence, and
a new decorative art. The Nibelungenlied and Kudrun are many
times longer than their originals, thanks to the accretion of new
material and to the more developed art of story-telling. The former
affects the Faeroese ballads of this cycle, modifying the details
offered by the Edda; it is also the direct source of the important
Danish ballad of Grimhild's Vengeance, which is in the debt of the
Thidrekssaga as well. As for Kudrun, its essential episode is the
recognition of a lost sister by a brother while she was washing
clothes beside the sea. Variously misrepresented, this episode
figures in the German ballads of Sudeli and others, and in the
Spanish Don Bueso. The epic itself is the most likely source,
but the evidence is not close enough to exclude the possibility