SCANDINAVIA 211

way, survives because of its broad humour, having shed the
subtlety of the original poet, whose pleasure it was to shoot barbed
arrows of wit against his gods. A pagan appeals to cOden Asagrim5
in the Swedish Proud Sir ^//(Anvidsson 2), but otherwise the gods
are unknown to ballad-mongers in Scandinavia. The vaguer under-
world of elves, nixes, trolls, and sprites persisted in the imagination
of men, and gave to the * viser5 their shuddering dread of the super-
natural. In Norway particularly, where the conditions of life are
peculiarly forbidding, ballads of malicious trolls and kobolds are so
numerous as to constitute a distinguishing mark of the region.

If the first half of the literature represented by the Codex
Regius had little influence on the ballads, the second entered almost
intact. The adventures of Sigurd and Gunhild have given rise to
traditional ballads which are doubtless but the residue of a more
copious older corpus. In the Edda the poets already handle that
saga episodically; the ballads follow suit, using the same episodes.
In matters of detail the German Nibelungenlied brought correc-
tions and variations which were used to modify the tradition in and
behind the Edda. The second lay of Helgi runs close to a ballad,
the Svipdagsmdl is assuredly a source of Ungen Svejdal (DGF 70),
and the Waking of Angantyr (among the Eddica minor a) of Angelfyr
and Helmer Kamp (DGF 19). Saxo tells this story in his fifth book,
and in the seventh he devoted many paragraphs to the tragic
history of Hagbard and Signe, rendering the vernacular verse in
various Latin metres. Saxo gives us the proper dynastic pomp and
circumstance; the ballad poet (DGF 20) seizes on the picturesque
detail that this unwanted wooer should have penetrated to Signe's
chamber in a female garb, and on the tragic tableau of his death,
hanged before her eyes. Known also in Sweden (Bergstrom 22),
the story was familiar in a highly generalized form in Germany
(Erk-Bohme 140) and Flanders (Hoffmann von Fallersleben 14).
Saxo relates old legends of Skj01d and Hrolf Kraki which have not
given rise to ballads. He puts into hexameters the Bjarkamdl^
which was sung in the vernacular to St. Olaf on the morning of the
battle of Stiklastad (1030). That poem, and the later StarkaSsmdl,
belong to an age of transition. They are concerned with heroic
defences against desperate odds. Bjarki, who is the counterpart of
our own Beowulf, defended the hall of Lejre while it blazed behind
him. He displayed the narrow heroic virtues and spoke the heroic
language, but he is not a great wanderer like Sigurd or the sagamen,