SCANDINAVIA 209

in the appropriate chapter of the first part of this book. Some one
who is famed for memory and voice sings the narrative lines of the
ballad, while the dancers move in a chain or ring, holding hands.
They halt and chant the refrain before moving in the other direc-
tion. The scene of these dances, before they descended to humble
barns, was the noble garth. They were a fit entertainment for the
gentry, who led the movements, and a spectacle for kings. They
were, however, and remain in the Faeroes, essentially local and
communal in character. The subjects might be international or
national, but the treatment and outlook were invariably circum-
scribed by the interests and requirements of a community closely
linked with the soil.

Collection and publication of Danish ballads began in a good
epoch. The hundred which A. S. Yedel presented to Queen
Sophia, at her request, in 1591, belonged to a period when the
medieval treasures of song were still unimpaired and when creation
was still active. The husband of Vedel's patroness lives in the
'viser' for his exploits in Dittmarschen. The collector, it is true,
was not above correcting his originals; yet Vedel's emendations
have themselves become traditional. A second hundred were
gathered by Peder Syv in 1695, while reprinting Vedel's pieces.
Taking manuscript evidence into account, Abrahamson, Nyerup,
and Rahbek reproduced 222 ballads and a number of tunes in
1812-14. Theirs was still the epoch of amateur editing. The whole
science of ballad study was altered by Sven Grundtvig in the great
collection which began to see the light in 1853. Grundtvig would
neither 'improve' his originals nor yield to the temptation to make
a e critical* edition. He realized that every version and variant of
a tradition has its own authority. Mere variants—small verbal
alterations—could be grouped in footnotes, with appropriate
acknowledgements; but each version of a ballad—involving
changes of some moment—must stand intact beside the other
versions. The editor copied manuscripts with the strictest faithful-
ness, and drew both on oral tradition and on that of the other
Scandinavian peoples. He himself collected the folk-songs of Ice-
land and the Faeroes. For Sweden he could rely on the work of
Afzelius and Geijer and that of Arwidsson; for Norway, on Land™
stad. To each ballad he prefixed an essay ranging over the whole
of the relevant European evidence. Curiously enough one of the
most fruitful sources for improving Grundtvig's work was one very

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