by tradition still floating in memory. The Färöe copies of "Greve Genselin" for example, as Grundtvig remarks, i. 223, note, though undoubtedly original and independent of Danish evince acquaintance with Vedel's printed text."[1]
The Danish and Scandinavian ballads appear to have been more influenced by recorded literature than the English ballads, and the Färöe versions in this matter bear a closer resemblance to the English.
One would expect that if recorded literature influenced the ballad, the ballad in its turn would influence recorded literature. But what are called ballads by many of our English Chroniclers are often only political poems of the Laurence Minot type, or like the song of the battle of Brunanburh. Therefore even when a chronicler quotes the substance of what he calls a ballad, we cannot come to a definite conclusion as to his having genuine ballad authority.
The ballad being the natural possession of the common people,, the question we are answering resolves itself into this other — how far high -class literary works can be considered to influence the life and thought of the people. The problem, owing to altered circumstances, bears little analogy with a similar problem in our time. Yet I think it a general rule that great literary endeavour gradually influences the life of the lower classes of society. Often literature which resembles the ballad in theme bears the same relation to it that Home's "Douglas" does to Childe Maurice. Recorded literature may influence the ballad as Home's "Douglas" influenced "Child Maurice," by creating in place of the pure traditional ballad a sophisticated version. Perhaps it might not be incorrect to conclude that there were mediaeval folk who could have said of other ballads as Mrs. Thomson said of "Chield Maurice," that in her youth Gil Morice "began with young lasses like her to be a greater favourite and more fashionable than the set which her grandmother and old folks used to sing."[2]
A ballad learned from print might become, in the second
- ↑ Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. i. p. 275.
- ↑ Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, quoted from Motherwell in introduction to Chield Maurice.
