GERMANY AND THE LOW COUNTRIES 263

the most impressive of Czech ballads. Sundry ballads concern
themselves with dreams, generally of an allegorical sort, and one
shows evildoers successfully cited before God's judgement seat.
The pied Piper of Hametin, The fiddling Hunchback, and The
Minstrel's Son (Erk-Bohme 14-16) are wonderful adventures told
to the credit of the profession. Erk connected the first of these
stories both with the character of Woden, as inferred from the
relics of Germanic mythology, and with the historical fact of the
twelfth-century migration of Saxons to Siebenbiirgen. Tannhduser
is, of course, a ballad of the supernatural, with its use of the learned
superstitions about the Sibyl's Paradise and its figure of Venus:

£Frau Venus, noble lady sweet,
thou art a devil-woman.*

The bulk of the German corpus is formed of ballads of adven-
ture, the greater part of these being love-songs. The remainder
concern horrific crimes: parricide, infanticide, rape, incest, poison-
ing. Many of these latter may refer to events which really occurred,
and indeed ballads generally offer that sort of assurance, even when
they are fictitious; but the circumstances are forgotten now, and
the appeal of the ballad is to the morbid-minded. Some of the
crimes belong to cycles of fiction. The guiltless prisoner is a figure
which the German singers have especially delighted to honour.
The whole group of adventure-ballads is dateless, and some may be
ancient. The general tone, however, is somewhat vulgar, especially
in the criminal pieces, and the favourite *mise-en-scene' the tavern.
It corresponds to the decline of taste in the later sixteenth century,
when the 4reiterJ took the place of the Critter3, the swashbuckler of
the knight. It is work of this quality which has overflowed into
the neighbouring lands, whose balladries rarely recall the purely
medieval aspects of the Volkslieder.

When love is the theme there is no absolute distinction between
song and ballad. The theme is immemorial. Already in the
twelfth century we have good work done, as in the untranslatably
simple Thou art mine, I am thine.l Its simple metaphor—the heart
that is a coffer safely locked and the key thrown away—is heard in

1 Du bist min, ih bin din:
des soltu gewfs sin.
Du bist beslozzen
in minem herzen:
verloren ist daz sluzzelin:
du muost immer drirme sin.