262 NORDIC BALLADS

Moral tales and pious legends also have some exemplars
worth quoting. Some are of souls rescued from condemnation at
heaven's gate, such as The pardoned Dancer, Three Sisters at
Heaven's Gate, and The poor Soul. The Sultan's Daughter (Erk-
Bohme 2127, 2128) turns a sentimental history to pious uses; and
a group of ballads exploits the matter of the old French fabliau of
Maquerel, the devil who rode a priest's concubine to hell (Erk-
Bohme 218, 219). The best of the group is The Smith's Daughter
(Erk-Bohme n) which isolates one tragic moment. It does not tell
us why the smith's daughter should have been bewitched into a
inare. We only know that the smith was forced to shoe her, and
drew blood with the nails till she cried out who she was in her
anguish. It is a moment of unspeakable sorrow in the lives of two
sinners. Few ballads better illustrate the truth that often the half is
better than the whole.

German ballads of supernatural adventure are less numerous and
less eerie than those of Denmark, Norway, and Scotland, but they
include some notable examples. The two merman legends (Erk-
Bohme i, 2) have been already discussed. Common to Denmark
and the German seaboard, they have been claimed as German, and
are in any case Germanic. In one version the location is given as
the Jade Estuary; it may well be original. In some the girl of the
second ballad is said to have been drowned in the Rhine, meaning
thereby the sea. The Rubezal (Erk-Bohme 3) is a hill sprite of
German nationality, and there are some entertaining ballads about
the humblest denizens of the other world: kobolds and poltergeists
(Erk-Bohme 4-6). The metamorphosis of damsels into trees and
flowers (Erk-Bohme 8-10) is a gracefully pathetic conceit. There
is a changeling (Erk-Bohme 12), and a Crowned Snake (Erk-
Bohme 13), who is held to her earthly lover by his possessing
her crown, just as Bulgarian sarnodivas are the servants of those
who keep their clothes. Lenore (Erk-Bohme 197-202) is the most
famous ballad of revenants, on account of its consequences, not its
merits. The Danish Aage and Else and Scottish Sweet William's
Ghost are superior by far. There are German equivalents for
the Orphan at her Mother's Grave, the child who cannot rest
in death because of its mother's weeping, the lover's talk with
his fiancee in her tomb, &c. The damp Shroud or Der Vorwirth
concerns a neglected dead husband who demands from his
wife a new shroud; it is the source of the Czech Rubas, possibly