BALLAD STORIES

OF THE

AFFECTIONS.

from the Scandinavian.

BY

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

NEW YORK:
SCRIBNER, WELFORD, AND CO.
1869.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

TRANSMITTED, in the same manner as the Scottish and Breton ballads, as a precious heritage from father to son, the old ballads of Scandinavia were preserved by popular recitation. With all their contradictions and inconsistencies, they are national—no ballads more so—distinguishable in genius from the Scottish writings of the same class, although possessing many delicate points of similarity. As for the themes, some are of German and others of Southern origin, while many are chiefly Scandinavian. The adventurers who swept southward long ago, to range themselves under the banners of strange chiefs, not seldom returned home brimful of wild exaggerated stories, to beguile many a winter night; and these stories in course of time became so imbedded in popular tradition, that it was difficult to guess whence they primarily came, and gathered ^vi so much moss of the soil in the process of rolling down the years, that their foreign colour soon faded into the sombre greys of Northern poesy. Travellers flocking northward in the middle ages added to the stock, bringing subtle delicacies from Germany, and fervid tendernesses from Italy and Spain. But much emanated from the North itself—from the storm-tost shores of Denmark, and from the wild realm of the eternal snow and midnight sun. There were heroes and giants breasting the Dovre Fjord, as well as striding over the Adriatic. Certain shapes there were which loved the sea-surrounded little nation only. The Lindorm, hugest of serpents, crawled near Verona; but the Valrafn, or Raven of Battle, loved the swell and roar of the fierce North Sea. The Dragon ranged as far south as Syria; but the Ocean-sprite liked cold waters, and flashed, icy-bearded, through the rack and cloud of storm. In the Scottish ballad we find the Kelpie, but search in vain for the Mermaid. In the Breton ballad we see the “Korrigaun,” seated with wild eyes by the side of the wayside well, but hear little of the mountain-loving Trolds and Elves. It is in supernatural conceptions indeed, in the creation of typical spirits to represent certain ever-present operations of Nature, ^vii that the Danish ballads excel—being equalled in that respect only by the German Lieder, with which they have so very much in common. They seldom or never quite reach the rugged force of language shown in such Breton pieces as “Jannedik Flamm” and the wild early battle-song. They are never so refinedly tender as the best Scottish pieces. We have to search in them in vain for the exquisite melody of the last portion of “Fair Annie of Lochryan,” or for the pathetic and picturesque loveliness of “Clerk Saunders,” in those exquisite lines after the murder—  

          “Clerk Saunders he started, and Margaret she turned
               Into his arms, as asleep she lay;
          And sad and silent was the night
               That was between thir twae.

          “And they lay still, and sleepèd sound,
               Until the day began to daw,
          As kindly to him she did say,
               ‘It’s time, true love, ye were awa’!’

          “But he lay still and sleepèd sound,
               Albeit the sun began to sheen;
          She looked atween her and the wa’,
               And dull and drowsy were his een.”

But they have a truth and force of their own which stamp them as genuine poetry. In the mass, they ^viii might be described as a rough compromise of language with painfully vivid imagination. Nothing can be finer than the stories they contain, or more dramatic than the situations these stories entail; but no attempt is made to polish the expression or refine the imagery. They give one an impression of intense earnestness—of a habit of mind at once reticent and shadowed with the strangest mysteries. That the teller believes heart and soul in the tale he is going to tell, is again and again proved by his dashing, at the very beginning of his narrative, into the catastrophe—

          “It was the young Herr Haagen,
               He lost his sweet young life!”

And all because he would not listen to the warnings of a mermaid, but deliberately cut her head off. There is no such pausing, no such description, as would infer a doubt of the reality of any folk in the story. The point is, not to convey the fact that sea-maidens exist, a truth of which every listener is aware, but to prove the folly of disregarding their advice when they warn us against going to sea in bad weather.
     The region to which we are introduced being that ^ix of tradition, not of history, we must have plenty of faith if we wish to be happy there. Everything we see is colossal, things as well as men being fashioned on a mighty scale: the adventurous nature burns fierce as fire, lives fall thickly as leaves in harvest, and the heroes sweep hither and thither, strong as the sword-blow, bright as the sword-flash. Two powers exist—physical strength and the command of the supernatural. Again and again, however, we leave the battle-field, and come upon “places of nestling green,” where dwell those gentler emotions which belong to all time and are universal. We have love-making, ploughing and tilling, drinking and singing. At every step we meet a beautiful maiden, frequently unfortunate, generally in love, and invariably with golden hair.
     Among the pieces founded on popular superstition, appear, as has been suggested, many of the gems of Danish ballad literature. In nearly every one of them we hear of enchantment, of men and maidens transformed into strange shapes; and it is remarkable that the worker of the foul witchcraft is invariably a cruel stepmother. The best of them are terse and strong, and impress us more solemnly than do the “Battle Ballads.” We are in a strange region, ^x as we read;—and everywhere around us rises the wail of people who are doomed to visit the scenes of their humanity in unnatural forms.

          “In nova fert Animus mutatas dicere formas
          Corpora,”

might be the motto of any future translator of these pieces. How the Bear of Dalby turned out to be a King’s son; how Werner the Raven, through drinking the blood of a little child, changed into the fairest knight the eye of man could see; how an ugly serpent changed in the same way, and all by means of a pretty kiss from fair little Signe. But there are other and finer kinds of supernatural manifestation. The Elves flit on “Elfer Hill,” and slay the young men; they dance in the grove by moonlight, and the daughter of the Elf King sends Herr Oluf home, a dying man, to his bride. The ballad in which the latter event occurs, bears, by the way, a striking resemblance to the Breton ballad of the “Korrigaun.” The dead rise. A corpse accosts a horseman who is resting by a well, and makes him swear to avenge his death; and, late at night, tormented by the sin of having robbed two fatherless bairns, rides a weary ghost; the refrain concerning ^xi whom has been reported verbatim, for no earthly purpose, by Longfellow, in his “ Saga of King Oluf:”—

          “Dead rides Sir Morten of Foglesong!”

The Trolds of the mountain besiege a peasant’s house, and the least of them all insists on having the peasant’s wife; but the catastrophe is a transformation—a prince’s son. “The Deceitful Merman” beguiles Marstig’s daughter to her death, and the piece in which he does so is interesting as being the original of Goethe’s “Fisher.”* Another ballad, “Agnete and the Merman,” begins—

          “On the high tower Agnete is pacing slow,
          Sudden a Merman upsprings from below,
                     Ho! ho! ho!
          A Merman upsprings from the water below!”

“Agnete! Agnete!” he cries, “wilt thou be my true-love—my all-dearest?” “Yea, if thou takest me with thee to the bottom of the sea.” They dwell together eight years, and have seven sons. One day, Agnete, as she sits singing under the blue water, “hears the clocks of England clang,” and straightway

     * Goethe found the poem translated in Herder’s “Volkslieder.”

^xii asks and receives permission to go on shore to church. She meets her mother at the church-door. “Where hast thou been these eight years, my daughter?” “I have been at the bottom of the sea,” replies Agnete, “and have seven sons by the Merman.” The Merman follows her into the church, and all the small images turn away their eyes from him. “Hearken, Agnete! thy small bairns are crying for thee.” “Let them cry as long as they will;—I shall not return to them.” And the cruel one cannot be persuaded to go back. This pathetic story, so capable of poetic treatment, has been exquisitely paraphrased by Oehlenschläger, whose poem I have here translated in preference to the original. The Danish Mermen, by the way, seem to have been good fellows, and badly used. One Rosmer Harmand does many kindly acts, but is rewarded with base ingratitude by everybody. The tale of Rosmer bears a close resemblance to the romance of Childe Rowland, quoted by Edgar in “Lear.”
     Of the large mass of ballads dealing with ordinary sorrows and joys consequent on the domestic affections, it is unnecessary to offer any description, since they form the bulk of the pieces here printed.* The

     * Udvalgte Danske viser fra Middelalderen, efter A. S. Vedels og P. Syvs trykte Udgaver og efter Laandskrevne Samlinger udgivne paa ny af Abrahamson, Myerup, og Rahbek. (Copenhagen, 1812.) Such is the title of the work from which most of the antique ballads here translated have been taken; but numerous other collections—Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish—have been referred to and used. The modern pieces by Oehlenschläger are to be found among his collected poems, in the editions published at Copenhagen. Those by Hoëdt and Bögh are taken from a little miscellaneous collection of verse, edited by Ingemann, and picked up by me for a trifle at a Danish bookstall.—R. B.

^xiii longest and best of them all is “Axel and Walborg.” This exquisite poem has been for centuries popular over all Scandinavia; places innumerable claim the honour of possessing Walborg’s grave, and rude pictures of the hapless lovers are scattered far and wide among the cottages of the North. As a picture of manners and customs alone, the ballad is priceless. Note, for example, the ecclesiastic ceremony, wherein the rascally Prince Hogen plays so black a part.
     In addition to a selection of old ballads, I have given, for the sake of variety, a few modern pieces, by Oehlenschläger and others. Out of the numerous originals, I have selected for the present purpose those which seemed the purest and best, passing over with reluctance several fine specimens which had been well rendered by previous translators. My ^xiv task, on the whole, has been one of no ordinary anxiety. Next to the difficulty of writing a good ballad ranks the difficulty of translating a good ballad, and very few men have succeeded in doing either. Had I consulted my own taste, and translated throughout in broad old Scotch (the only really fitting equivalent for old Danish), I should not only have hopelessly bewildered English readers, but have laid my efforts open to dangerous comparison with those of Jamieson.* I have, therefore, done the best I could in the English dialect, using Scotch words liberally, but only such Scotch words as are quite familiar to all readers of our own ballads.
                                                                    R. B.

     * Robert Jamieson, who, among his “popular ballads,” published in 1806, gave five from the Danish, rendered with a rugged picturesqueness transcending the best efforts in that direction of Scott himself. This Jamieson was a veritable singer, and struck some fine chords from a Scotch harp of his own.

CONTENTS.

PAGE             

[Notes:

This is a transcription of the second, unillustrated, edition of Ballad Stories of the Affections: from the Scandinavian. The original edition was published by George Routledge & Sons in 1866 with illustrations by G.J. Pinwell, J. D. Watson, J. Lawson, T. Dalziel, A. B. Houghton, E. Dalziel, W. Small, engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. This second (cheaper) edition was published in 1869 by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston (London) and Scribner, Welford and Co. (New York).

The motto on the cover of this edition,"The stretched metre of an antique song" is taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17:

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies:
Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’
So should my papers yellow’d with their age
Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme.

Keats also used the line as the epigraph to  Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818).

The 1869 edition includes several small engravings which are reproduced here. Additionally the initial letter of the Preface and each poem is ‘illuminated’ in a similar style but I have not included those illustrations in the text.

The Latin quotation, “In nova fert Animus mutatas dicere formas Corpora,” in the Translator’s Preface is the first line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses - “My mind leads me to tell of forms changed into new bodies ... ”.

None of the poems in Ballad Stories of the Affections: from the Scandinavian are included in the 1884 edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan. However, one poem, ‘The Lead-Melting’ was included in The New Rome (1898) and was also included in the 1901 edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan, with no indication that it was a translation of the work of Claudius Rosenhoff (1804-69).

_____

From Chapter IX of Harriett Jay’s biography:

“Shortly after his marriage Mr. Buchanan went to Denmark. ‘Being one of the very few Englishmen of that day who knew the Danish language, he went to Schleswig-Holstein towards the end of the war as correspondent of the Morning Star. It was on his return from thence that he wrote so freely on Scandinavian literature, an unknown world to the bookmen of that day.’ (Pearson’s Weekly) He was accompanied on this expedition by his father (who also, I should imagine, went in some official capacity), and during the absence of the pair the young wife went to stay with her mother-in-law, who at that time was living in the neighbourhood of Shepherd’s Bush. It was during that visit to Denmark that he met Hans Christian Andersen; he also visited the famous Thorwaldsen Museum, and was so much impressed by the figures of Christ and the Apostles, that he purchased the one of Christ and brought it home as a present to his wife.”

The Second War of Schleswig lasted from February to July 1864. Further details of the conflict are available on wikipedia.

The Thorvaldsen Museum has a website which contains the following picture of the sculptor’s figure of Christ, which so impressed Buchanan.]