GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 203

that the ballads may rely on the sources of the epic. Other
reconditioned German epics have had ballad consequences in
Germany: the Hugdietrich and Wolfdietrich, Biterolf and others.
The influence of Ortnit and Hugdietrich, and possibly of the
Thidrekssaga, has extended also into Russia.

In the Scandinavian North also, ballads have drawn heroic
material from literary works in a relatively recent manner. These
are the sagas. The Hervararsaga has already been mentioned.
Ragnar Lodbrokssaga, though late and somewhat puffy, was a
favourite with ballad-makers in Denmark and Norway. Norwegian
balladry shows a considerable number of pieces taken from the
less-known sagas, and in the Faeroe Islands this method of aug-
menting the people's repertoire was well established. One such,
Ormurin langi, was rough-hewed from St. Olafs Saga last century,
though the style is wholly that of old traditional ballads.

Summing up, then, we notice that the primitive Germanic epics
form the background of both German and Scandinavian balladry,
but they are not immediate sources. The immediate sources are
in Scandinavia the older Edda and the heroic sagas, while more
recent sagas affect the ballads of Norway and the Faeroes. In
Germany the immediate sources are the lost Dietrich compilation
(probably for both the Hildebrand and the freely composed
Ermanaric's Death) and the reconditioned epics of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. The Danish ballad of Hagbard and Signe is
not easy to place. There does not appear to be any mediating
saga. Saxo Grammaticus gives a number of Latin renderings of
a Danish poem which was more circumstantial than the extant
ballad.

English balladry is quite without these epic contacts. From the
tenth century England was assimilating the Romance culture of
France, and her epic traditions were fading from memory. In the
eleventh she was overrun by the romanized Normans. Her writers
contributed to French literature, and during the whole Middle
Ages much French literature was composed by subjects of the
English Crown. It is therefore not surprising to note that, in place
of Germanic epical traditions, Child's collection shows, in the
specifically English pieces, a double dose of ballads dependent on
French romance. The Arthurian motif is prominent: The Boy and
the Mantle, King Arthur and King Cornwall, The Marriage of Sir
Gawain, King Henry. Then we have Hind Horn, King John and the