volume of 1591 is the fountain-head of all that has since been written about the Heroic Ballads of the North, and it is impossible to overrate the services of Vedel in preserving what was even then ready to disappear.  It seems, moreover, that he was careful of the text, and later scholarship has come more and more to place confidence in his transcripts.

This was, unfortunately, not the case with the next pioneer in the same field, although he deserves great credit also.  Peter Petersen Syv (1631–1702) was a very able philologist, who was also a minor poet of ambition.  In 1695 he reprinted and edited Vedel’s text, adding 100 more kjæmpeviser which had been unknown to Vedel.  But his work was not so well done; Syv was something of a pedant, and unfortunately either too critical or not critical enough.  He ventured to correct the irregularities of the ballads, and not seldom has spoiled them.  He bore the proud title of Philologer Royal of Denmark, and he was above all things else a grammarian.  But he added to our store of Ballads.  No one, during the eighteenth century, advanced on the labours of Vedel and Syv, and their treasuries of beautiful anonymous poetry seem to have attracted no attention in the rest of Europe.

But in the first decade of the nineteenth century, in consequence of what we call the Romantic Revival, poets and scholars in many countries turned simultaneously to the treasure-house of Danish balladry.  Jamieson’s work, to which I shall presently return, dates from 1806; about the same time Herder translated one or two kjæmpeviser in his Stimmen der Völker, and in

1809 Wilhelm Carl Grimm started his full translation, under the title of Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen and Märchen, which appeared in 1811.  But it appears that Grimm had heard and perhaps even seen the proofs of a Danish edition of the very highest importance, the Udvalgte Danske Viser fra Middlealderen, the first volume of which was brought out by Abrahamson, Nyerup and Rahbek in 1812. [9]  Abrahamson dropped out, but the work was completed by the others, the fifth and last volume appearing in 1814.

Borrow’s relation to these texts must now be considered, and it offers some difficulty.  In 1826 he published a volume of verse entitled Romantic Ballads translated from the Danish, and in the

preface he uses these words:—“I expect shortly to lay before the public a complete translation of the Kiæmpé Viser, made by me some years ago.”  It is necessary to bear in mind that there are these two collections of Borrow’s translations from the kjæmpeviser, the second of which, as we shall see, he did not contrive to publish.

No doubt, he was anxious to emphasise the novelty and rarity of his literary adventures.  But his attitude to Jamieson is very strange.  As early as 1806 Robert Jamieson (1780–1844) had published a volume of Popular Ballads, in which he had translated several of the kjæmpeviser and had pointed out their value in relation to the ancient Scottish poems of a similar kind.  Sir Walter Scott paid much flattering attention to Jamieson’s work, which also attracted a good deal of notice in Denmark and Germany, and inspired the Drei altschottische Lieder of G. D. Gräter (1813).  It is scarcely possible that Borrow was not aware of all this, yet he never mentions the name of Jamieson, and in 1826 he spoke boldly of himself as breaking into “unknown and untrodden paths.”  It is not impossible that Sir