226 NORDIC BALLADS

whet the emotions, as in Sir Sallemand, Sir Sverkel, The Foundling^
and the Icelandic Tale ofMargreta.

Taken as a whole there is a sombre tone in the themes and the
verse of the North. Despite some mocking ballads (skasmteviser), one
does not encounter the light touch of French folk-song. It is not a
convention that love and marriage should be targets for wit, despite
the Tricked Suitor (UDV 122, DGF 229). The tone of the whole
Northern balladry is earnest, and its language and concepts
intense. The form tends to diffuseness and lyricism; it is remark-
able how the poets contrive to pour into their essentially lyrical
mould a content which is strictly narrative, and even dramatic.
The unity of style prevailing throughout the whole corpus is one
of its most remarkable features. The 'viser' must have been an
absorbing passion. The graver emotions are exploited with in-
genuous mastery: love strong as death, jealousy, revenge, treachery,
and the formless, viewless horror of an evil world ever beside
man's elbow.

For the sake of convenience this account of Scandinavian
balladry has been based on Danish collections, not merely because
they are on the whole older and better than the others, but also
because Danmarks gamle Folkeviser is, in some sort, a summation
of all other evidence on the subject. The survival in Danish of a
given ballad, however, is not necessarily proof of its Danish origin.
On the contrary, we have seen evidence of Norwegian creative
activity, which has enriched the common fund. The regional
differences of the 'viser', though interesting for the specialist, are
rarely such as to demand notice in a general statement like the
present. The Swedish songs resemble, when viewed as a corpus,
those of Denmark most intimately. Arwidsson and Bergstrom are
complementary collectors, so that, for instance, we find in Arwidsson
precisely those epical ballads which we miss in Bergstrom. Danish
is spoken in one of the Swedish provinces—in Skane—and the two
languages are so intimately allied that transference is almost im-
mediate from the one to the other. On the other hand, there are
signs of specially close relations between Norway, Iceland, and the
Faeroes. The Norse ballads recorded by Landstad show consider-
able originality. The activity of trolls and monsters is more con-
stant and more formidable, and there is a greater use made of minor
and late sagas as the source of ballad stories. A very curious piece
in Landstad's collection is DraumekvseSi (7). Olaf Astason or